U.S. Market Structure Bill May Slide to January as Talks Continue Over Several Points

The U.S. Senate negotiations over a crypto market structure bill — the industry's top goal in its policy lobbying — hasn't yet resolved several disagreements as the talks drift toward the holiday break, suggesting real progress may not happen before January.

Legislative text has been circulating privately among industry insiders, and executives took a look at some of the current draft in a White House meeting on Thursday, according to people familiar with the process. The pages were shown very briefly in a meeting led by President Donald Trump's crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, they said, though industry representatives haven't given the approach a stamp of approval.

As many as four significant points remain to iron out if Democrats are going to be convinced to join forces with Republicans on the bill. What amounts to a four-sided negotiation involving Senate Democrats, Republicans, the White House and the crypto industry hasn't come to an accord on such elements as ethics rules for government officials' involvement with digital assets (most significantly, President Donald Trump), whether stablecoins should be tied to yield, and what powers the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may be granted to decide which tokens it governs and treatment of decentralized finance (DeFi).

Already, the White House has thrown back the negotiators' pitches on the Democrats' ethics approach, which would ban top government officials from squeezing profits from crypto interests, as seen with Trump and his family businesses. And the crypto industry has drawn certain red lines around the freedoms under which DeFi should be allowed to operate.

Witt noted in a posting on social media site X that the White House and Senate Republicans "are in lockstep on the need to protect software developers and DeFi."

Despite the separation over certain bargaining positions, the tempo and intensity of the negotiations continues to be as high as they've ever been in the Senate, giving hope to lobbyists that the legislation may advance toward a formal committee markup in the coming weeks.

"I've never been so optimistic, and I've never seen both parties so eager to sit at the negotiation table or negotiating table and move paper back and forth," said Cody Carbone, the CEO of the Digital Chamber, one of the leading Washington advocacy groups for crypto. "There is a real desire and momentum from everyone involved to get this done."

Finishing such a bill would finally establish U.S. positions on defining crypto tokens, setting rules for how the markets will operate and determining which agencies have authority over what activity. Meanwhile, the regulators who would implement it are moving ahead on their own to try to establish some of those points through statements, guidance and rule proposals, though they generally acknowledge that a comprehensive crypto law is the best course for making the system durable.

But the Senate has limited bandwidth and only a handful of work days left this year. Lawmakers who had personally spent time at the negotiating table have withdrawn to their states for the weekend, though their staff may still be in discussions. While the public emergence of incomplete legislative language is still possible at any point, crypto insiders have already begun gaming out the possibilities of January.

If potential markups in the Senate Banking Committee and Agriculture Committee are held into the first weeks of 2026, that could still stay ahead of another potential budget battle at the end of January like the one that recently shut down the federal government for several weeks.

"Negotiations are still underway, but realistically looking at the calendar, there are only a few days left," Carbone told CoinDesk. "So it's not a sign of momentum shifting that these conversations are moving into January. The progress is still happening, and I would expect real movement early in the new calendar."