U.S. Senator Lummis Says Negotiations on U.S. Cryptocurrency Legislation to Be ‘Delicate’

Long-awaited legislation for U.S. stablecoin issuers is a “pretty delicate” subject of negotiations, Senator Cynthia Lummis said on Thursday. Negotiations are taking place every day not only between Democrats and Republicans, but also between the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, she added. As the Senate’s most credible crypto policy advocate and a co-author of one of the broadest legislative efforts to regulate digital assets, Lummis suggested that the stablecoin side may have the best chance of success. She said the proposal has received "good technical assistance feedback" from the Federal Reserve System. Lummis said: “I am optimistic that we will see stablecoin legislation this year, maybe even in the first half of the calendar year. The further into the calendar year, the harder it will be to get members of Congress to focus on thorny legislative issues because their attention spans are all on his own re-election and maintaining his partisan majority.” This Congress has made greater progress on cryptocurrency legislation than in the past, with Republican-dominated House committees advancing market structure and stablecoin bills to the full House for consideration. The bigger bottleneck so far has been the Senate Banking Committee, where Democratic leadership has publicly expressed little interest in passing a cryptocurrency bill this year.