Senators Still Hopeful for Crypto Market Structure Law by End of Year

The U.S. Senate's market structure bill should pass by the end of the year, leading lawmakers working on the effort said Wednesday, though efforts on this bill will likely push beyond the Sept. 30 deadline previously set by the Senate Banking Committee's head.

"I don't want to put an artificial deadline on anything," said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), speaking at CoinDesk's Policy and Regulation event in Washington, D.C. "We're in the middle of negotiations about whether we're going to have a bipartisan budget, so the most important issue that Congress has to deal with right now is the fiscal cliff."

The question of timing has loomed large in the market structure work, with President Donald Trump having initially set an August deadline to have all the congressional crypto work on his desk. That optimistic deadline slipped first to the end of September, when Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott had said he wanted to have the market structure work done.

That deadline now still holds for part of the job, said Senator Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who heads the panel's crypto subcommittee. She said she hopes to have the Banking Committee's work on it finished by then, but that will still leave the other necessary committee — Senate Agriculture — catching up in October, she added. While Lummis has previously mentioned Thanksgiving as a target, she said on Wednesday that "might be too optimistic."

"It's really important to me that we get this done by the end of the calendar year," Lummis said. "It's like being pregnant for four years, you know. Please, let it happen."

Ethics concerns

A group of Senate Democrats published a list of priorities they wanted to see included in any market structure bill, ranging from consumer protections to regulators' jurisdictions.

"What it allows for is an understanding that this is going to be bipartisan," Gillibrand said, adding that Democrats may have different perspectives on issues like on- and off-ramps for decentralized finance and consumer protections.

One of the Democrats' pillars would, if implemented, bar lawmakers including the president and vice president's families from profiting off of crypto projects. Gillibrand said it was important to have an ethics component to prevent any appearance of self-dealing or breaches of the Emoluments Clause.

"I think it's important to have this lens of ethics," Gillibrand said. "It's something that really undermines the entire industry."

However, she added that at this point in the negotiations process, there was no "line in the sand" for Democrats. "It's very important to me and I'd like to get the best ethics provision that's possible."

Lummis, speaking after the panel, said she would rather see any effort to restrict crypto trading by elected officials be its own separate effort, and potentially combined with securities and other investments, because she argued that cryptocurrencies shouldn't warrant distinct treatment.

"I think that we're going to have to have a dialogue with Democrats who are concerned about this president and future presidents' participation," she said.