Two Crypto Bills Advance in House After Senate Setback

Barely a day after the CLARITY Act failed to clear a Senate procedural vote, two separate pieces of crypto legislation moved forward in the House — evidence that the broader push for federal digital-asset rules is fragmenting into smaller, more winnable fights rather than stalling out entirely.

House committees move first

The House Financial Services Committee voted 28-21 to advance H.R. 8957, the American Reserve Modernization Act, a bill introduced by Republican Rep. Nick Begich with Democratic Rep. Jared Golden as its sole Democratic co-sponsor. The bill would establish the legal status of a federal “strategic bitcoin reserve,” requiring that any bitcoin held by the government be custodied by the Treasury Department and held for a minimum of 20 years. Bitcoin the government acquires through forfeiture would flow directly into the reserve, while proceeds from selling other seized assets could be redirected either to buy more bitcoin or to pay down the national debt. The bill now heads to the full House, though no floor vote has been scheduled.

On the same day, the House Ways and Means Committee voted 38-5 to advance H.R. 10357, the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, in what the committee itself called the first bipartisan federal tax framework built specifically for digital assets. The bill would exempt small transactions from tax reporting when a network or transaction fee is $10 or less, though that provision would not take effect until December 2027. Beyond that de minimis threshold, it sets out rules for how crypto income gets recognized, how transfers are treated, wash-sale rules for actively traded tokens, and new tax treatment for mining, staking and stablecoin holdings. Both bills passed with bipartisan support, but the Financial Services vote broke closer to party lines than the near-unanimous tax committee vote, an early signal of which fight will be harder to win on the floor.

Senate Democrats signal they're not done

The House movement came as seven Senate Democrats — including Kirsten Gillibrand, Mark Warner and Ruben Gallego — issued a joint statement pledging to keep working toward passing the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that fell short of the 60 votes needed to open Senate debate. “This week was a setback, but not the end of that important work,” the senators said, adding that they remain committed to a bipartisan path toward passage “by the end of the year.” Three people familiar with the discussions told reporters the statement is meant to test whether both parties are willing to return to the table at all, rather than announcing any actual breakthrough in the underlying disagreements.

Those disagreements haven't gone away. Republicans have pushed for a version of CLARITY that gives the CFTC primary oversight of most digital-asset spot markets, while Democrats have raised concerns about carve-outs for decentralized exchanges and about how the bill would treat firms with ties to the Trump family's own crypto holdings — tensions that were already visible in the counterproposal Democrats sent just hours before the failed cloture vote. None of that friction touches the two bills that moved Wednesday, which is likely why they advanced so much more smoothly: a strategic bitcoin reserve and a tax framework for everyday crypto transactions don't carry the same market-structure stakes that have made CLARITY such a fight.

Even so, both House bills face a long runway before becoming law. Neither has a scheduled floor vote, and with limited legislative days remaining in this session of Congress, aides in both parties have cautioned that further progress on any of the three bills — the bitcoin reserve act, the tax bill, or a revived CLARITY Act — is far from guaranteed before the year is out.