Senate Republicans Schedule Crypto Bill Vote Despite Divide on Key Issues

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, announced Tuesday he will bring the group’s crypto market structure bill up for a key vote next week—despite concerns that doing so could doom the legislation’s odds of passage this year.

For months, a group of pro-crypto Democrats and Republicans have gone back and forth negotiating language in the sprawling bill, which would establish a regulatory framework for most of the American crypto industry. Crypto groups have spent years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, building bipartisan support for their coveted legislation in Washington.

But due in part to the bill’s complexity, Senate Democrats—and a handful of on-the-fence Republicans—have refused to acquiesce to calls from the White House and others to vote on it by certain deadlines. First pro-crypto Republicans wanted the bill passed by July; then by October; then by the end of 2025. Each deadline came and went without a vote.

Now, Scott appears dead-set on having a key markup vote on the legislation by next Thursday, January 15—whether his colleagues are ready or not.

“I think it’s important for us to get on the record and vote,” Scott said Tuesday, in an interview with Breitbart. “So, next Thursday, we’ll have a vote on market structure. We have worked tirelessly for the last six plus months making sure that we had multiple drafts available to every member of the committee.”

The vote will determine if the bill can pass out of the Senate Banking Committee—a key hurdle before a final consideration of the bill on the Senate floor. It is currently unclear, however, whether a majority of senators on the committee are prepared to support the legislation in its current form.

Top crypto lobbyists were already skeptical the bill would be able to pass this year, even under less hurried circumstances. After Scott’s announcement of an accelerated voting schedule Tuesday, some crypto leaders openly voiced concern about the strategy’s implications.

“You have to push the markup hearing if it’s not bipartisan, if there’s any hope of a deal,” Scott Johnsson, a general partner at Van Buren Capital and frequent crypto policy commentator, said.

On Tuesday, Senate negotiators from both parties, along with White House officials, met to discuss Republicans’ “final offer” on the market structure bill’s language. A copy of the so-called final offer, first obtained by Politico, lists a number of key issues as still unresolved.

Among them: “ethics,” a likely shorthand for the thorny issue of conflict-of-interest provisions restricting the ability of the president, members of Congress, and their families, from engaging in crypto ventures. Also listed were “yield,” a reference to existing rules on stablecoin yield that the powerful banking industry desperately wants changed, and “quorum,” a likely reference to the Democrat-led plan to ensure a bipartisan quorum at federal financial regulators like the CFTC and SEC as the Trump administration erodes their independence.

Perhaps most crucially, the document also listed two items central to the regulation and legal protection of decentralized financial software, also known as DeFi, as “to be discussed”: the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, included in the House’s crypto market structure bill, and “18 USC 1960,” the U.S. code that defines illegal money transmitters. The matter is a highly sensitive issue for crypto advocates on one side, and for Democrats concerned about national security and money laundering on the other.

Salman Banaei, general counsel at Plume, had a pessimistic view of next week’s vote given the unresolved state of current negotiations.

“If markup is next week and the current state of the negotiations has yielded a GOP ‘closing offer’ to Senate Dems, I’d say prognosis is poor for a bipartisan vote,” he said.