US Senate crypto bill collapses in blow to industry

The defeat dealt a major blow to efforts to establish first comprehensive federal framework for digital-asset markets.

The United States Senate has failed to advance comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation backed by President Donald Trump in a major blow for digital-asset companies and Republicans who had championed the bill for months.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act failed on Tuesday to secure the ۶۰ votes needed to advance to a debate in the Senate, with safeguards governing Trump’s extensive crypto interests among the biggest obstacles to a deal.

Four Republican senators – Jerry Moran, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley and Thom Tillis – joined all the Democrats in voting against it. The vote was ۵۰-۴۹ in favour.

The vote effectively put the bill on ice, as Congress is set to depart Washington this month ahead of the November midterm elections in which Trump’s fellow Republicans are fighting to retain control of the House of Representatives and Senate.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said the bill posed “massive risks to families, our national security, and our economy”.

“And if that’s not bad enough, while Americans across the country suffer from an affordability crisis, this bill will turbocharge President Donald Trump’s ability to rake in billions and billions of dollars from crypto,” she said.

The defeat dealt a major blow to efforts to establish the first comprehensive federal framework for digital-asset markets – and offered another illustration of Congress’s struggle to keep pace with disruptive new technologies as lawmakers wrestle with a similarly fraught debate over artificial intelligence.

Tillis switched his vote from yes to no in a procedural move that preserves his ability to bring the measure back up for reconsideration later.

The dispute was not purely partisan.

Community banks fiercely opposed provisions allowing rewards on stablecoin holdings, arguing they could pull deposits out of traditional lenders and reduce funding available for farmers and small businesses.

Several Republican senators also expressed concerns about those provisions, complicating party leaders’ efforts to muster support for the bill.

‘Crypto president’

The deep-pocketed crypto industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars campaigning to advance the bill.

Trump, who has earned more than $۱.۴bn from his family’s crypto ventures, had urged Congress to pass it. Trump courted cash from the crypto industry on the ۲۰۲۴ campaign trail, calling himself a “crypto president”.

His regulators, particularly the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will now be positioned to fill the crypto policy void, but efforts to write favourable rules for the digital-asset industry could prove challenging.

Industry experts have said that only Congress can create a lasting regulatory framework. Without legislation, regulations will be vulnerable to a shifting political climate and court challenges, creating lingering hazards for the crypto industry, executives and analysts said.

The Trump administration’s own extensive rollback of dozens of SEC and consumer watchdog policies introduced under former Democratic President Joe Biden has underscored that risk.

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, fell more than ۵ percent as the vote appeared set to fail, its biggest daily percentage decline since June. Shares of crypto exchange Coinbase and stablecoin issuer Circle fell as much as ۱۰ percent.