Senate stablecoin bill passes with bipartisan support

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s stablecoin bill passed through the upper chamber by a vote of 68 to 30 vote on Tuesday. 

The bill, known as the GENIUS Act, now goes to the House, where another stablecoin bill — known as the STABLE Act, sponsored by House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill, R-Ark. — is being considered. House lawmakers will have to choose between passing the GENIUS Act as-is or passing the STABLE Act and initiating a reconciliation process. 

The GENIUS Act in many ways already cleared its biggest hurdle last month when the upper chamber passed a cloture vote — a procedural vote to end debate on a bill, which requires 60 votes — by a vote of 68-30. The final floor vote, by contrast, requires only a simple majority.  

Should the House decide to make changes to the GENIUS Act or pass the STABLE Act, the two chambers would have to meet in a conference committee to hash out the differences between the bills.

Rep. French Hill, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has signaled that passing stablecoin legislation, alongside the cryptocurrency market structure bill he’s championed — known as the CLARITY Act — is a priority. How the various bills are reconciled between themselves is still up in the air. 

“Both these bills are very, very important to the goal of a digital asset future for the U.S.,” he said on Fox Business last week. “You can’t just pass a stablecoin bill and have anyplace to effectively use it. You need the CLARITY Act to give us that market framework.”

The House version doesn’t contain some of the more controversial elements found in the Senate bill, including a provision that would let Special Purpose Depository Institutions expand nationwide. That’s despite a last-minute change from Senate Republicans that requires SPDIs to have a payment stablecoin subsidiary. 

“Critical changes must be made during House consideration of the legislation to prevent unintended consequences and further mitigate financial stability risks,” Conference of State Bank Supervisors said in a statement. “CSBS remains concerned with the dramatic and unsupported expansion of the authority of uninsured banks to conduct money transmission or custody activities nationwide without the approval or oversight of host state supervisors.” 

Banking trade organizations have also raised concerns that the stablecoin bill might not go far enough to separate banking from commerce. 

The stablecoin bill is important not only because it outlines the broad strokes of stablecoin regulation — which could become important to large and small banks alike — but also because it crosses over into a broad range of payments topics, including the reach of SDPIs. 

The bill comes on the heels of aggressive political contributions from the crypto industry in the latest national elections cycle. The legislation has been able to garner a level of bipartisan support that has not been possible in previous Congresses because of a lack of support from Democratic lawmakers. Many Democrats now in Congress benefited from crypto industry contributions in the 2024 election cycle. 

Even so, there are some notable holdouts among the Democratic party who’ve been attempting to pry off support for the legislation, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Warren has repeatedly worked to slow down crypto legislation out of a concern for potential conflicts of interest related to the crypto dealings of President Trump and his family, as well as out of concern for consumer protection, illicit finance and financial stability implications of expanding the crypto market.