06-12-2025 
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United States digital asset market structure legislation got a boost from two House committees, while the Senate is set to do likewise with its stablecoin legislation this week.
- House markup sessions advance CLARITY
- GOP defends Trump’s right to crypto profit
- Senate’s Thune invokes cloture on GENIUS
- SEC chair exempts DeFi, CFTC chair nominee facing ‘clusterf*ck’
- Trump family resolves Wallet brouhaha, buy BTC via mining op
Tuesday saw two House of Representatives committees—Agriculture and Financial Services—hold dueling markup hearings on the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which aims to divvy federal responsibility for overseeing digital assets.
CLARITY assigns most of this responsibility to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), with a minor role for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the (now exceedingly unlikely) case that certain tokens are deemed to be securities as defined by the Howey test.
The Ag committee—to which the CFTC reports—went first, approving CLARITY by a 47-6 vote after minimal debate, or at least, without major fireworks.
It was a different story at the Financial Services committee—which oversees the SEC—which took until early Wednesday to finish debating (and rejecting) an endless series of amendments before voting 32-19 to favorably report their version of CLARITY to the rest of the House.
The two marked-up versions must now be consolidated into a single bill before heading to the House floor for a vote. Assuming the votes are there, this will mark the second time the House will have passed market structure legislation, following last year’s passage of FIT 21 (which came too late to be taken up by the Senate ahead of last year’s elections).
While much of the Financial Services Committee conversation focused on President Donald Trump’s sprawling crypto ventures, one of the buzziest elements came before the hearing when CLARITY was revised to exclude any ‘non-controlling blockchain developer or provider of a blockchain service’ from having to conform to money transmitting rules and regulations.
The language previously existed in a standalone bill called the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act that has kicked around Congress for years without becoming law. Including it in CLARITY was a bone tossed to decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and developers who have long argued that, since they don’t technically custody assets flowing through their creations, they shouldn’t be held to the same responsibilities as platforms that do control customer assets.
Federal court rulings have supported this DeFi-friendly view, but there will be no need for judges to intercede on developers’ behalf if this protection is codified into law. There will almost certainly also be an explosion in the use of crypto ‘mixing services’ like Tornado Cash by hackers and other bad actors looking to launder and obfuscate the digital trail of their ill-gotten gains.
Once this language was included in the revised CLARITY, a number of crypto lobbying groups issued a joint statement hailing its inclusion as “a meaningful step towards protecting developers of non-custodial, peer-to-peer technologies while maintaining strong oversight of custodial financial institutions.”
What did the president sell and when did he sell it?
As far as the committee’s Democrat members were concerned, last week’s dueling CLARITY hearings didn’t feature enough discussion of the view that Trump is influencing the loosening of crypto’s regulatory guardrails to line his own pocket.
As such, the Dems held a ‘minority day’ hearing on June 6 that aimed to shine the spotlight on Trump’s apparent crypto self-interest. Ranking member Maxine Waters (D-CA) opened the proceedings by claiming that “the unfortunate reality is that Republicans on this Committee refuse to openly admit that Donald Trump is abusing his position as President to enrich himself off crypto.”
This subject was raised again and again on Tuesday but continued to fall on deaf GOP ears. To illustrate how the two sides were talking past each other, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) at one point expressed incredulity that CLARITY would restrict nearly every public official except the president and vice-president from using non-public information on digital assets for personal profit or sharing said info with others.
In response, chairman French Hill (R-AR) replied that “when people say ‘I want this conflict removed’ and they name a subject, that subject is addressed in this bill.” Except, as Himes just pointed out, it’s very much not addressed.
Regardless, Hill claimed that CLARITY “captures everyone participating in it … everyone regardless of their last name is subject to the same oversight and enforcement under the requirements of this bill before us.”
Senate stablecoin hardball
Over in the Senate, market structure legislation is still in the embryonic stage but the same can’t be said for the GENIUS stablecoin bill. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) invoked cloture on GENIUS for the second time, filing a new 120-page substitute version of the bill that will set up a cloture vote on Wednesday, followed by further debate this week and a floor vote possibly as early as Monday (16).
Thune evidently became concerned that the growing number of amendments—122 as of June 9, up from 71 last week—presented an unwanted obstacle to getting a ‘clean’ version of GENIUS to the Senate floor for a vote.
While some Senators continue to submit proposed tweaks, Thune filed an ‘amendment tree’ that requires new amendments to win unanimous approval, effectively consigning these last-minute entrants to the dustbin.
Thune’s latest version of the bill was officially submitted by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and incorporates a handful of minor changes intended to help sway reluctant senators (mostly Democrats) to a ‘yes’ vote.
But it doesn’t include the most contentious amendments like the unrelated credit card swipe fee language being pushed by Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) that many senators viewed as a dealbreaker. There’s also none of the Democrat-filed amendments intended to clip the president’s crypto-profiteering ways.
The House Financial Services Committee approved their own stablecoin legislation (STABLE) on April 2 in a 10-hour markup session that rivaled Tuesday’s marathon. Once both chambers have approved their respective bills, they need to agree on a harmonized bill they can send to Trump’s desk for signing into law.
SEC hints at DeFi ‘exemption’; Quintenz eager to join CFTC ‘clusterf*ck’
DeFi scored another win on Monday during the SEC’s latest ‘crypto roundtable,’ this one titled DeFi and the American Spirit. The opening remarks by newly confirmed SEC Chair Paul Atkins included his direction to SEC staff to “consider a conditional exemptive relief framework or ‘innovation exemption’ that would expeditiously allow registrants and non-registrants to bring on-chain products and services to market.”
Some DeFi boosters have erroneously reinterpreted Atkins’ comments to claim that DeFi had been exempted from any SEC oversight whatsoever. Atkins didn’t go that far, but did suggest that the U.S. shouldn’t allow “century-old regulatory frameworks to stifle innovation with technologies that could upend and most importantly improve and advance our current, traditional intermediated model.”The day after the SEC’s table talk, President Trump’s nominee to head up the CFTC was being grilled on Capitol Hill. Brian Quintenz is a former CFTC commissioner who currently serves as head of policy at crypto-focused venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Quintenz also served as a director for Kalshi, the prediction market that waged a long-running legal battle with the agency Quintenz now hopes to lead.
These industry ties led some members of the Senate Agriculture Committee to question whether Quintenz might be conflicted while overseeing companies with which he had such deep ties. There’s also the minor matter that Kalshi’s list of ‘strategic advisors’ includes Donald Trump Jr., presenting yet more potential conflict.
Quintenz’s prepared remarks held up his work history as a major selling point, although he lost points by citing his earlier history as a young legislative “aid” in the House for over six years. (All that time and he never learned to spell ‘aide’?)
Grammatic quibbles aside, Quintenz espoused his view that blockchain was “a horizontal technology that has the potential to touch every aspect of society,” not just financial services. However, Quintenz claimed that this will only happen if digital asset operators “have clear rules of the road to build without fear of regulation by enforcement.”
Quintenz urged Congress to hurry up and pass market structure legislation already, stressing the need for “token classification clarity and clear jurisdiction for trading market oversight.” Quintenz claimed that “blockchain and crypto tokens are here to stay,” so it was time to either legislate/regulate or get off the pot.
Quintenz argued that the CFTC will require “new resources” to handle its new crypto responsibilities, a stance with which most of the senators appeared to concur.
Asked about his work with Kalshi and the possibility of CFTC-approved prediction markets horning in on gambling operators’ turf, Quintenz deflected, saying those types of conflicts were best left to Congress to muddle through.
Earlier this year, the CFTC was scheduled to hold a prediction markets roundtable that many high-profile gaming operators were expected to attend. But the event was canceled without explanation, save vague promises of reshaping the roundtable into “more of a forum or hearing.” Quintenz said he’d reschedule the meeting once he was confirmed.
Quintenz was also questioned about the unprecedented number of CFTC commissioners who have announced their exits in recent weeks. Of the five commissioner seats, only two are currently occupied, and one of those (Caroline Pham) is only sticking around until Quintenz is confirmed, while the other (Kristin Johnson) is planning to leave at some unspecified date this year.
Pressed as to whether he’d urge President Trump to maintain tradition by appointing bipartisan replacements for the four outgoing commissioners, Quintenz dodged, saying he wasn’t about to “tell the president what to do.”
Quintenz’s eventual confirmation by the GOP-controlled Senate doesn’t appear to be in any serious jeopardy. But with Congress poised to hand the bulk of crypto oversight to the commissioner-bereft CFTC, one former Wall Street regulator told Politico that Quintenz was “walking into a clusterf*ck.”
Wallet war truce, Trump mining treasury
Meanwhile, last week’s highly public slapfight over who had the right to issue a Trump-branded digital wallet appears to have resolved itself.
GetTrumpMemes, the company behind the $TRUMP memecoin, made waves last week with claims to have partnered with non-fungible token (NFT) platform Magic Eden on the launch of “The Official $TRUMP Wallet by President Trump.”
But Trump’s sons Don Jr., Eric, and Barron all pushed back hard on these claims, disavowing any family role and revealing that the Trump-controlled DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLF) had its own official Trump wallet in the works.
Bloomberg subsequently reported that WLF sent cease-and-desist letters to the unauthorized wallet launchers, and the GetTrumpMemes’ Trumpwallet.com site went offline shortly thereafter. The @TrumpWalletApp X account, which had been suspended last week, is currently back online but its posts are limited to approved followers.
On June 6, Eric Trump tweeted that the parties behind $TRUMP had “aligned” with WLF and the $TRUMP wallet “isn’t moving forward.” The official WLF X account added that “[t]he Trump meme and WLFI may be different lanes, but they share the same highway.”
Eric also revealed that WLF “plans to acquire a substantial position in $TRUMP for their Long-Term Treasury.” The $TRUMP token, which had fallen to $9.56 in the wake of the highly public dustup, rallied slightly following Eric’s buying announcement and currently sits around $10.80.
There doesn’t appear to be any hard feelings on the president’s part, as on June 5, he reposted a $TRUMP-promoting Newsmax article to his Truth Social account that claimed the token was a ‘tracker’ of the president’s success. However, since the May 20 article notes the price of the token was “over $13,” the president’s ‘success’ is trending in the opposite direction.
That downward trend could accelerate next month, as 50.5 million additional $TRUMP tokens are scheduled to be unlocked on July 18. That represents 25% of the current circulating supply. A similarly large unlock will occur on January 18, 2026. Additional smaller unlocks (about 1% of the circulating supply every three days) are occurring daily, and this pace will increase to just under 1% of the circulating supply every two days by next January.
Meanwhile, the Trump-linked block reward mining outfit American Bitcoin Corp (ABTC) has amassed a BTC ‘treasury’ of 215 tokens worth around $23 million as of May 31. In a filing with the SEC, ABTC says its BTC holdings will be “long-term in nature,” and the company “expects to continue accumulating” tokens into the future.
There’s no specific target for how much BTC might be enough for ABTC, nor whether the company might raise additional capital to buy more. ABTC states emphatically that building up this treasury “is not a side effect of ABTC’s business. It is the business. ABTC’s Layer 2 strategy is designed to transform its Bitcoin production into long-term Bitcoin ownership.”
ABTC was launched on April 1 as a majority-owned subsidiary of mining outfit Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT), with the Trump family holding 20% of ABTC. Hut 8 provided “substantially all” of ABTC’s mining rigs (~61,000 rigs), with the Trump contribution limited to new chief strategy officer Eric Trump’s “commercial acumen, capital markets expertise,” and other intangible qualities.
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