The White House’s top crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said work was still underway to secure the compromise he said would advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in the U.S. Senate, although he said several other items were also being worked out behind the scenes.
In an interview on CoinDesk TV on Monday, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Digital Assets suggested Monday that the common ground that top senators from both parties said they had achieved on stable coin yield appears to be intact. “We hope that the compromise that has been reached will be durable and hold,” Witt said. “It was essential to resolve this issue before we could address the other outstanding issues,” which he said he had now turned his attention to, although some issues have already been resolved.
Besides the issue of stablecoin yield, on which bankers were able to convince some senators that their deposit base could be in jeopardy, the Clarity Act presented a number of other potential problems. Among these are illicit financial protections in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and Democrats’ demand to ban high-ranking government officials (including President Donald Trump) from profiting from the crypto sector.
Although Witt did not identify the topics that have been settled in the ongoing negotiations, he said the negotiations “have made considerable progress in the background,” while the yield argument between banks and crypto companies has gained attention.
“We’re about to close them,” he said. “All of these problems seemed intractable and intractable at one point. So the fact that we were able to solve many of them gives me confidence that we can solve these others as well.”
The Clarity Act would require a hearing in the Senate Banking Committee before it can be advanced to a final Senate vote. Such a hearing was close at the beginning of the year, but bank lobbyists raised objections to the stable yield of the coins, delaying the process.
Last week, White House economists released a report downplaying the threats the banking industry says is posed by offering stablecoin holders a return that resembles the interest on a bank account. On Monday, the American Bankers Association responded, saying the White House’s argument was flawed. Witt said bankers’ views vary widely, depending on how close they are to technology.
“They are struggling with this,” he said. “These are all important issues for their members.
And, you know, some of them are going to view stablecoins more positively. Some people are going to be a little more threatened by them. »
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