This January is a crucial time for the Senate regarding efforts to regulate the cryptocurrency market.
After years of back-and-forth on Capitol Hill, including key victories like the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, two Senate committees have now scheduled simultaneous markup sessions for the crypto markets bill for next Thursday (January 15).
The two separate but intertwined hearings include markup sessions in the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Both committees must advance versions of the Crypto Market Structure bill before a unified text can even reach the Senate.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) has publicly set his sights on a markup, signaling an aggressive desire to force resolution of issues that had previously stalled negotiations.
“It is my understanding that the President will vote, against all odds, on Thursday for next week,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Agriculture Committee is expected to hold its own markup on the same day, a sign that leaders want to get both sides of the regulatory divide in sync.
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Officially, neither committee has released finalized legislation before their sessions, raising questions about whether members will vote on the updated drafts or older language.
Learn more: Compliance is Crypto’s New Cost of Doing Business
Liquidity, cash management and the Stablecoin question
At its core, market structure legislation seeks to answer a fundamental question: How should digital assets be regulated in the United States? Current law divides oversight between the SEC (for securities) and the CFTC (for commodities), but the rapid growth of tokenized markets, decentralized finance (DeFi), and stablecoins has blurred these categories in ways that regulators never anticipated.
If the Agriculture and Banking committees come up with versions of the market structure bill that can be reconciled, the Senate could consider a formal vote within weeks. If both chambers agree on identical language, the bill would be sent to the president’s desk for signature.
But if committee members fail to agree, whether due to unresolved issues such as DeFi accountability, yield mechanisms, or jurisdictional divisions, the bill could stall or be significantly rewritten in the following months.
For purely crypto businesses, markup is both perilous and promising. A clear federal framework could unlock vast institutional capital flows and legitimized market infrastructure. But heavy regulatory burdens could also impose compliance costs that favor large incumbents over nimble startups.
The treatment of DeFi remains particularly uncertain. Proponents argue that decentralized protocols provide efficiency, transparency, and competition to existing systems. Skeptics within regulatory agencies and financial institutions warn that DeFi’s code-based models challenge fundamental standards of investor protection and market integrity.
And although the signed GENIUS Act established ground rules for stablecoins last year, a major regulatory flashpoint remains unresolved: whether crypto companies can offer yield-like rewards on stablecoin holdings. Traditional banks say such yield mechanisms siphon deposits from community banking markets and create unfair competition.
Cryptocurrency companies counter that yield incentives are key to liquidity and user adoption, and that banning them outright would stifle innovation in DeFi and related markets. This impasse emerged as one of the most potentially disruptive compromises in the markup process.
If the bill included a strict ban on yield, it could appease banking interests but risk alienating segments of the crypto industry. Conversely, if markup language fails to robustly address the problem, opposition from banking lobbies could make it more difficult to achieve bipartisan consensus.
Read also: Conditional charters bring crypto closer to the heart of the US banking system
Why Crypto Market Structure Matters for Finance Teams
For years, exposure to cryptocurrencies at most large companies has been either tactical (payment experiments, pilot programs) or passive (holding digital assets received in transactions). Regulatory uncertainty, particularly around custody, asset classification and counterparty risk, has made any ambition more difficult to justify to boards and auditors.
For chief financial officers (CFOs) and treasury leaders, the legislation under consideration could redefine how companies manage liquidity, deploy cash, hedge risks and interact with financial infrastructure over the next decade.
The Market Structure Bill would establish registration regimes and compliance standards for digital asset intermediaries, which could bring cryptocurrency custody closer to the regulatory expectations that CFOs already apply to banks, broker-dealers and clearinghouses.
Goldman Sachs, for example, has reportedly seen increased adoption of cryptocurrencies as regulations improve and new uses emerge.
For financial leaders, the key issue is predictability. Treasury teams need to know the applicable rules before committing resources, integrating systems or approving new financial instruments. Fragmented oversight increases the risk of non-compliance and discourages adoption.
