US House Hearings Mark Step Forward in Cryptocurrency Market Regulation Bill
Democrats on the committee were surprised by the reluctance of witnesses to discuss possible conflicts of interest related to President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency business.
Jesse Hamilton | Edited by Nikhilesh De Updated April 9, 2025, 6:16 PM Published April 9, 2025, 4:27 PM
Key points:
- The House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Digital Assets held a hearing to discuss proposed legislation to regulate the cryptocurrency market, the second and more complex of two key initiatives being pushed by President Donald Trump and his allies.
- Democrats have sought to highlight the president's interests in the cryptocurrency business.
- Representative French Hill, who chairs the House Committee on Agriculture, suggested that legislation to regulate the market would be introduced soon, and a similar subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on the structure of the cryptocurrency market on Wednesday.
The U.S. House Financial Services Committee has outlined the next step in what Rep. Bryan Steil called the “second half” of President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency agenda: a bill to regulate the U.S. cryptocurrency market into a fully-controlled domestic industry.
Steil, a Republican who chairs the panel’s crypto subcommittee, noted that the first part of Trump’s goal is already in the works — a congressional stablecoin bill that has already advanced through the House and Senate committees — so Wednesday’s hearing examined another long-awaited digital asset bill aimed at establishing a framework for cryptocurrency markets. The hearing represents a step toward moving such initiatives through Congress.
Representative French Hill, an Arkansas Republican and the chairman of the overall committee, indicated that the bill is nearing completion and would be a successor to the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), a House bill that passed last year but failed to gain Senate approval.
“The committee has engaged with a wide range of stakeholders, from government agencies to market leaders, to identify ways to further improve and strengthen the market structure legislation,” he said during the hearing. “We are actively working to develop a draft of the legislation under consideration that takes into account this feedback from market members and participants.”
Democrats on the committee repeatedly returned to Trump and his family’s cryptocurrency activities, questioning industry lawyers about whether it represented a conflict of interest. Representative Maxine Waters, the committee’s ranking Democrat, accused the committee of trying to make Trump the “czar of crypto” by passing legislation that would allow him to corner the stablecoin market, displacing George Washington from the dollar and creating his own stablecoin.
Witnesses largely avoided discussing Trump, though consumer advocate Alexandra Thornton, a senior director at the Center for American Progress, testified Wednesday and noted that “there have been a lot of steps that the Trump administration has taken in favor of cryptocurrency, including a lot of the things you mentioned, as well as firing a lot of law enforcement officials and dropping a lot of cases against cryptocurrency.”
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