U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, a lawmaker at the center of talks on the crypto industry’s top policy goal to pass a market structure bill, said the talks have probably reached the necessary compromises to move the legislation forward.
“We think we’ve got it,” Lummis, the chairwoman of the Senate Banking Committee’s digital assets subcommittee, said at the Digital Chamber’s DC Blockchain Summit on Wednesday. “We really are going to get it out of the banking committee in April.”
Lummis has been deeply involved in months of talks over the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act language. After the process was derailed by bank lobbyists who’d argued that stablecoin yield would threaten their industry’s deposit accounts, much of the debate centered on stablecoin rewards programs that the crypto industry believed were still allowed under last year’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
The Wyoming Republican said she believes the final compromise will disallow crypto platforms from offering rewards that use any language that equates them with deposit yield or ties the rewards to the amount of assets a user holds.
“Anything that sounds like banking product terminology will not appear,” she said. She added that she hasn’t seen the most recent language, but she said that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has been “really pretty good about being willing to give on this issue.”
Armstrong and his U.S. exchange, which has leaned heavily into stablecoin rewards programs, had opposed an earlier compromise effort, which had initially helped derail the legislative process on this bill.
Senator Bernie Moreno, another Republican on the committee, said in a video statement at the same event that two of his colleagues on the panel, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks and Republican Thom Tillis are in the final stage of the stablecoin talks, which also involves the White House. Once they all sign off, it’s “go time” for the bill.
Previous disagreements over language governing the security of decentralized finance (DeFi) has also been worked out, Lummis said.
But at the same event, Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a frequent partner of Lummis on crypto issues, said that another issue that needs to be resolved is the Democrats’ request that the bill bans senior government officials from personally profiting from the crypto industry — a concept that especially targets President Donald Trump.
“It’s very important that we include this,” she said on Wednesday. No government official in Congress or the White House should “get rich off their position and their knowledge base,” she said, and including such restrictions will “unlock many more votes” from Democrats on the bill.
Lummis suggested the legislation will get a hearing after the Senate’s Easter break, pointing to late April. If it does clear such a hearing, known as a markup, that will mark the second necessary committee approval (after the Senate Agriculture Committee had already passed a version earlier this year). Then it gets reworked into a combined version that could eventually face a vote by the overall Senate.
The Senate’s schedule, however, is very much in flux. Both parties are threatening unrelated legislative tussles over other legislation and the war in Iran, which could occupy valuable floor time in the coming weeks. And the Senate’s 2026 session will also be shortened by the midterm congressional elections later in the year.
“We’re going to have this thing done, come hell or high water, before the end of the year,” Lummis said.
UPDATE (March 18, 2026, 15:18 UTC): Adds comments from Senator Bernie Moreno.
UPDATE (March 18, 2026, 16:28 UTC): Adds comments from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on the bill’s ethics provision.
