Sam Wolfe/Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — Top Republican lawmakers on banking and agriculture committees announced a bicameral working group that will draft bills for cryptocurrency and stablecoins.
The White House crypto czar, David Sacks, alongside Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill, R-Arkansas, and the heads of Senate and House agriculture committees announced the working group in a press conference on Tuesday.
“I look forward to working with each of you in creating a golden age in digital assets,” Sacks told a group of reporters with the lawmakers assembled. “
Scott echoed his sentiment, and said that it’s his goal to pass crypto market structure and a stablecoin bill through the Senate in the first 100 days of
“It’s an exciting time to be an American,” Scott said. “The golden age has begun.”
The working group’s approach will be similar to work already done by the House Financial Services Committee last Congress, with the FIT21 bill championed by Hill.
“That bill I think had the basics for the exact bill that we’ll propose to introduce again in the 119th Congress,” Hill said. “There may be some modest changes, but it had bipartisan support.”
Stablecoin legislation, which the bicameral working group will also tackle, will be similar to a bill floated earlier in the day by Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., that would split up U.S. oversight of stablecoin issues between state agencies and the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The policymakers continued to rail against the idea of debanking, tying it again to crypto companies who complain that they had difficulty accessing the banking sector during the Biden administration.
“We’re coming off, frankly, four years of arbitrary prosecution and persecution of crypto companies, where the SEC wouldn’t tell founders what the rules were, but then they would prosecute them, and many founders have even told me stories of being debanked personally just because they had founded a crypto company,” Sacks said.
Scott is holding a hearing on debanking on Wednesday that will feature Nathan McCauley, the founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital. The digital assets subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee will also hold a hearing on “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” focusing on crypto and including Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer of Coinbase, on Thursday.
In response to a question about whether the working group will address anti-money laundering legislation as part of its crypto work, Hill said that previous legislative work on digital assets has included AML provisions and has considered the Bank Secrecy Act.
“In the drafts that we proffered last year, they had strict AML and BSA standards in them for this digital arrangement that are not unlike the requirements for analogs in the financial services space,” he said.
Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, talked about bringing regulatory clarity to the space, which he said would improve banks’ ability to interact with the sector.
“Our goal is to make sure that consumers are protected, to make sure that the industry, in order for it to grow and be able to offer all the things that it does offer to the various industries that are out there, whether you’re a bank, or whether you’re investing a client’s money for their retirement or whatever, you’ve got protections,” Boozman said.