Markup of the Senate Bill for the Crypto Market Structure Pushed to the End of January

The Senate Agriculture, Food and Forestry Committee postponed a planned advance of sweeping crypto market structure legislation until the last week of January, with Chairman John Boozman (R-AR) saying bipartisan talks had made progress over the weekend but more time was still needed to finalize outstanding issues before the bill could move forward.

In one statement Released Monday, Boozman said the committee would delay consideration of the bill to ensure it receives the broad support needed to move forward.

A delay now leaves the outcome of those talks unresolved, with industry support still dependent on how lawmakers ultimately tackle DeFi and stablecoins, as the bill heads to a new markup later this month and a possible test of bipartisan support in the Senate.

“I remain committed to advancing bipartisan legislation on crypto market structure,” Boozman wrote. “We have made meaningful progress and had constructive discussions as we work toward this goal.”

The intention was for the committee to adjust the legislation on Thursday, January 15, in line with that of the Banking Committee planned action on the market structure.

It comes as stakeholders in the crypto and financial sector met privately last week to get the details of the Crypto market structure billintroduced in 2023 by a bipartisan group of parliamentarians. It past the House in May 2024, but stalled in the Senate that year.

During discussions, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a major Wall Street trade group, pushed to narrow disagreements over the Senate’s crypto market structure bill, while crypto policy advocates sought to moderate SIFMA’s requests.

Sources familiar with the meeting reported this earlier Declutter that the treatment of decentralized finance and questions surrounding yield-bearing stablecoins were among the issues still being debated.

In cryptocurrency, decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to blockchain-based applications that allow users to trade, lend or manage assets directly through software, without a bank or broker holding customer funds.

The policy conflict centers on whether developers of these systems must meet the same legal obligations as financial intermediaries when they have no control over user assets.

Revenue-bearing stable coins are dollar-pegged tokens that provide returns to holders, typically by sharing the interest earned on reserves.

While Trump’s GENIUS law established ground rules for stablecoin issuance last year, it left open how to treat these yield-generating models and DeFi software, pushing unresolved questions into the current market structure debate.