- Trump repeals so-called DeFi brokers rule.
- Landmark stablecoin bill heads for the Senate floor.
- The Department of Justice makes a big call on crypto cases.
A version of this story appeared in our The Guidance newsletter on April 14. Sign up here.
The Trump administration and Congress are moving swiftly to satisfy the agenda of an industry that wasn’t even a player in Washington a few years ago.
On Thursday, Trump pulled the plug on the Biden administration’s so-called DeFi broker rule by signing a bi-partisan legislation into law.
The rule would’ve forced crypto websites and digital wallets to record and maintain vast amounts of customer data the same way stock brokerages do.
Big win
The idea was that the Internal Revenue Service would use the data to prevent tax evasion and help crypto users report their taxes, Aleks Gilbert reported.
It’s a big win for the likes of MetaMask, which was facing the prospect of setting up a costly customer data management system at odds with crypto’s penchant for privacy.
Then on Sunday, Senator Tim Scott, the chair of the influential Senate Banking Committee, said a key stablecoin bill was “stamped, done, and heading to the Senate floor.”
This is a major breakthrough for the industry.
The Genius Act will lay out a statutory framework for stablecoins and potentially usher in a new era when traditional payments processing firms as well as banks ply customers with their own offerings.
First time
Should stablecoins become integrated into the payments processing infrastructure it would mark the first time a blockchain-based technology became a mass market staple.
There is plenty of dissent.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrats on their respective finance committees, have warned that the Genius Act and its House counterpart fail to protect the financial system or consumers from fraud.
Yet it appears there’s enough Democratic support in the Senate to pass the Genius Act and it could soon be on Trump’s desk.
Then there was the extraordinary memorandum released by the US Department of Justice last week that said prosecutors would cease pursuing many types of crypto crimes.
The guidance drew a distinction between platforms that willfully allowed or facilitated fraud and other unlawful activity, and those that were simply used by bad actors.
The development was good news for Roman Storm, the Tornado Cash co-founder who is scheduled to go on trial in July on charges of facilitating money laundering.
While the DoJ signalled the memo should not affect Storm’s case it probably would not have been brought under the guidance.
So, for all the angst in the markets, crypto is making strides on the policy front.
Edward Robinson is the story editor for DL News. Contact the author at ed@dlnews.com.
