- Market structure legislation in making progress, according to a White House official.
- The government shutdown has both hampered and helped negotiations.
- The legislation had stalled in the Senate after it passed the House in July.
Major crypto legislation is “full steam ahead” despite a government shutdown, a White House crypto official said on Wednesday.
“From our office, I haven’t noticed hardly any difference,” Patrick Witt, executive director of President Donald Trump’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, said at Ripple’s Swell conference in New York City.
He was referring to negotiations over the Clarity Act, a market structure bill that passed the House over the summer only to stall in the Senate.
“We’re at it morning until night every day, and we’re continuing to make a lot of progress during this time.”
The US is currently mired in a record-long government shutdown. Congressional Democrats refuse to back a Republican bill to fund the government unless Republicans agree to reintroduce healthcare subsidies they stripped from the federal budget earlier this year.
That has led to the furlough of government workers, including some that White House officials have relied on to advance the president’s crypto agenda.
“Them being furloughed has set things back in terms of providing that technical expertise,” Witt acknowledged.
But in other ways, the shutdown has made negotiations easier.
“A lot of the meetings that senators would be having have kind of fallen off their calendars, and so we’ve been able to engage with them a lot more,” Witt said.
In July, the House of Representatives passed market structure legislation dubbed the Clarity Act, which would install the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as the crypto industry’s primary regulator.
While the House bill drew significant bipartisan support, Senate Democrats have been leery.
Their concerns threatened to derail the legislation in October, when their counterproposal leaked to the press.
That proposal sought to classify virtually every protocol in decentralised finance as a “digital asset intermediary” required to verify customer identities and adhere to anti-money laundering regulations.
It elicited a furious response from the crypto industry and led to a tense meeting between Democratic senators and crypto proponents in DC.
That meeting appears to have borne fruit, however. On crypto betting platform Polymarket, odds the Clarity Act will pass in 2025 have tripled since mid-October.
Despite the setbacks, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan gave market structure legislation an 80% chance of passing by early next year.
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.