The White House Makes a Late Push to Finish the Crypto Market Structure Bill
Administration officials and industry leaders spent the week pressing senators to bring the digital asset framework to a vote, more than a year after it cleared the House.
The White House and senior figures in the digital asset industry mounted a concerted effort this week to get the market structure bill through the Senate in the coming weeks, reviving legislation that has spent months on the calendar without a vote.
The push helped set off the strongest week in crypto markets in two years, with bitcoin gaining roughly 22% and XRP nearly 40%.
Where the bill stands
The House passed its version in July 2025 by 294 to 134, with more than 70 Democrats in favor. The Senate Banking Committee advanced companion legislation 15-9 in May. In late July, Senate Republicans released updated text merging that committee's work with the Agriculture Committee's separate bill covering commodity intermediaries — an attempt to settle the jurisdictional fight between the two panels before it reached the floor.
Then it stalled. The majority leader told reporters in late July that he did not expect it before the recess, and floor time in an election year is scarce.
Earlier this month, the chamber took a procedural step toward a vote.
What is actually in dispute
Three things, and none of them are new.
The treatment of decentralized protocols, where the question of who is being regulated has no clean answer when there is no company behind the software.
Consumer protection provisions that several senators consider inadequate for an asset class whose retail investors are down roughly 39% from last October's peak.
And an objection, raised repeatedly in committee, to writing a favorable framework for an industry with significant political entanglements.
Why the industry wants it now
Because the alternative is already happening. The SEC is preparing an exemption for certain token offerings, and both market regulators are writing rules under existing authority. Those rules can be undone by the next administration through the same process that created them.
A statute is harder to reverse. For an industry that has argued for five years that its central problem is uncertainty, the difference between a rule and a law is the difference between a truce and a treaty.
