The U.S. Senate Banking Committee has postponed a planned markup of the crypto market structure bill after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said he could not support the current draft, creating uncertainty over the measure’s prospects.
The legislation would define the conditions under which crypto tokens are classified as securities, commodities, or other instruments and would assign oversight of spot crypto markets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Committee Chairman Tim Scott said discussions with industry and lawmakers would continue during the pause. “I’ve spoken with leaders across the crypto industry, the financial sector, and my Democratic and Republican colleagues, and everyone remains at the table working in good faith,” he said in a post on X.
“As we take a brief pause before moving to a markup, this market structure bill reflects months of serious bipartisan negotiations and real input from innovators, investors, and law enforcement,” Scott added.
This move comes after Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, a leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said in a post on X earlier in the day that the company “could not support” the bill in its current form, arguing it had “too many issues,” including what he called “a de facto ban on tokenized equities,” an erosion of the CFTC’s authority, and amendments that would “kill rewards on stablecoins.”
Armstrong said cryptocurrencies should be treated on a “level playing field” with other financial services and that the sector would be better off with “no bill than a bad bill,” adding that Coinbase would keep fighting for Americans and economic freedom.
Political, Ethical and Implementation Hurdles for The Bill
This “brief pause” comes after the bill has faced several hurdles in recent days.
Justin Slaughter, a former senior adviser at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and vice president for regulatory affairs at Paradigm, warned that the U.S. crypto bill draft could face serious hurdles in Congress and in implementation, pointing to gaps in ethics, questions over how oversight would be shared, unresolved treatment of decentralized finance projects, and a heavy rulemaking load that could stretch across two presidential terms.
Additionally, Slaughter’s warning comes as the Senate Agriculture Committee pushes a planned markup of its crypto bill to the final week of January, saying it needs more time to settle details and secure bipartisan support.
