House Committee Advances Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act in 38â5 Vote
The most consequential development in United States crypto policy this week came not from the agencies but from Capitol Hill, where the House Ways and Means Committee advanced the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act in a 38â5 bipartisan vote on Wednesday. The vote sends a broad rewrite of federal crypto tax rules to the full House for consideration, marking one of the most significant pieces of digital asset legislation to progress this far in the current Congress.
The margin matters. A 38â5 result on a committee that is often sharply divided along party lines signals that tax treatment of digital assets has become one of the few areas of crypto policy where genuine bipartisan consensus exists. Committee approval is, of course, only a step; the full House and the Senate must still act before any measure reaches the president’s desk. But the breadth of the vote gives the bill momentum that more contested crypto legislation has conspicuously lacked in recent months.
The Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act is the rare crypto bill that touches ordinary investors directly. Federal tax rules for digital assets have long been a source of confusion and compliance cost, and a comprehensive rewrite would affect everything from how gains are calculated and reported to how exchanges, brokers and software providers handle their obligations to clients and to the Internal Revenue Service. Passage out of committee suggests lawmakers have concluded that the current framework is no longer fit for purpose.
Readers tracking the wider legislative picture can follow developments in our regulation coverage.
Agencies Step In as CLARITY Act Stalls in the Senate
The committee vote landed against a backdrop of legislative frustration. The CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that would draw a clearer boundary between SEC and CFTC jurisdiction over digital assets, has stalled in the Senate. Its failure to advance has left the industry without the statutory clarity it has spent years lobbying for, and the consequences were visible in the market: crypto stocks fell after the bill stalled, as investors priced in a longer wait for the regulatory certainty that many public companies have said they need before deepening their exposure to digital assets.
Into that vacuum, the agencies are moving. According to Cointelegraph’s roundup, analysts at Bernstein expect the SEC and CFTC to proceed with rulemaking that is, in the broker’s words, aggressive and swift, filling the gaps Congress has left open. The logic is straightforward. If legislation will not define the market structure framework, the existing regulators will do it themselves through the rulemaking and enforcement tools they already possess.
Two concrete actions on Wednesday illustrated exactly what that looks like in practice.
CFTC Expands Relief for Passive Software Providers
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission expanded regulatory relief for passive software providers, a category that covers firms which develop and distribute trading or protocol software without taking custody of customer funds or executing trades on their behalf.
The significance of this move is easiest to understand by considering what came before it. For years, developers of decentralised trading infrastructure have faced an unresolved question: does writing software that others use to trade constitute enough involvement to trigger registration as a broker, dealer or trading facility? The CFTC’s expanded relief points toward an answer in which pure software development, absent custody or active intermediation, sits outside the perimeter of traditional commodity-market regulation.
For the sector this is meaningful in three ways. First, it reduces the compliance cloud hanging over software firms that had no clear path to registration even if they had wanted it. Second, it effectively draws a line between passive infrastructure and active intermediaries, which should help courts, investors and the firms themselves distinguish between the two. Third, it demonstrates that the agency-led route Bernstein describes is not merely theoretical; the CFTC is already using its exemptive and interpretive authority to reshape the perimeter in real time.
There is a strategic dimension as well. With the CLARITY Act stalled, each agency has an incentive to establish its position through its own actions rather than wait for Congress to allocate jurisdiction for it. The CFTC’s move on software providers can be read as the commission staking out its view of where its authority, and the limits of that authority, actually lie.
SEC Approves Temporary Exemption for Tokenised US Stocks
The Securities and Exchange Commission, for its part, approved a temporary exemption permitting limited trading of tokenised US stocks on certain onchain venues. The exemption is time-limited and scope-limited, but its symbolic weight is considerable.
Tokenised equities, in which shares of listed companies are represented as blockchain-based tokens, have been one of the fastest-growing corners of the digital asset market. Until now, venues offering these instruments in the US have done so under significant legal risk, since tokenised securities trading has generally required registration or exemption pathways not designed for onchain infrastructure. A temporary exemption, even a narrow one, gives sanctioned room for the experiment to run under the SEC’s watchful eye.
The implications run in both directions. For onchain venues, it offers a compliance foothold in the US market and a chance to demonstrate that tokenised stock trading can meet the commission’s standards for investor protection and market integrity. For the SEC, it functions as a live test case: a way to observe how onchain settlement, around-the-clock trading and self-custody interact with securities regulation before committing to a permanent framework.
Investors should note the caveats. A temporary exemption is not an approval of tokenised equities as a general matter, and the limits on which venues and which activities qualify will determine how much market impact the move has in the near term. What it clearly signals, however, is that the SEC under its current leadership is more inclined to grant controlled experimental space than to hold the sector in indefinite limbo. That is a meaningful shift in posture, and one that exchanges and infrastructure providers will factor into their US launch decisions.
Bitcoin Reserve Legislation Advances
Alongside the agency actions, US lawmakers advanced legislation to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, according to the day’s second Cointelegraph summary. The proposal, which would establish a government-held reserve of bitcoin as a national asset, has moved from talking point to active legislative vehicle.
The reserve bill and the tax bill together suggest that Congress has not abandoned crypto legislation wholesale, even after the CLARITY setback. Rather, the pattern now emerging is one of narrower, more targeted bills advancing where consensus exists, while the broadest and most contested questions of market structure are left to the agencies.
Analysis: The Centre of Gravity Shifts from Congress to the Agencies
Taken together, the week’s developments sketch a new phase in US crypto policy. The legislative route has not closed, as the 38â5 committee vote and the reserve bill progress show. But the centre of gravity has shifted. With the CLARITY Act stalled and crypto equities reacting negatively to that stall, the SEC and CFTC have become the primary architects of the operating rules for digital asset markets, and Bernstein’s expectation of aggressive and swift rulemaking suggests the pace will accelerate rather than slow.
For exchanges, software firms and investors, this carries a practical message. The binding constraints on US crypto activity in the coming months will increasingly be set by exemptions, relief orders and agency rulemakings rather than by statutes, which means the details of each individual agency action will matter enormously. A temporary exemption here or an expanded relief order there can open or close a business line overnight.
The risks are equally clear. Agency-made rules can be revisited by a future commission, challenged in court, or superseded by legislation that eventually passes. The market’s negative reaction to the CLARITY stall reflects precisely that instability: investors and operators know that a framework built by rulemaking is a framework built on shifting ground. The House vote on the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, and the fate of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve legislation, will indicate whether Congress intends to reassert its role or leave the field to the regulators. For now, the agencies hold the pen.
