The House Ways and Means Committee has circulated seven bills ahead of this week’s hearing on crypto tax policy, signaling what the industry can expect.
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The story
The House Ways and Means Committee is the group of lawmakers responsible for writing laws governing taxes. While we’ve seen bills dealing with taxes before, it’s this committee that’s really going to handle a lot of the work of drafting crypto tax legislation and guiding it through the legislative process.
Why it matters
The fact that the committee is about to discuss a bill at a hearing shows progress on this front, and it is likely that the provisions will eventually become law in the coming years, whether as part of a specific tax legislative package or as part of another, broader bill.
Break it down
Staking and mining, de minimis transactions and stablecoins are all covered in bills circulated Thursday evening by the House Ways and Means Committee, among other issues.
It’s unclear what progress will be made toward turning these bills into law in calendar year 2026. The House — and the Senate, for that matter — have a number of other priorities that are further along and require talking time, as CoinDesk has previously covered. Nevertheless, the existence of the bills and a hearing constitute important steps.
Alison Mangiero, head of industry affairs and U.S. policy at the Crypto Council for Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement that the group of bills was an “important first step.”
“The Ways and Means Committee’s decision to release seven bills and follow them with a full legislative committee hearing on June 9 is important for procedural reasons alone,” she said. “This format, in which members work on specific legislation with expert witnesses before any mark-ups, is one that the Committee has not used in years. This type of deliberate, structured engagement represents the Committee’s unique focus on this important work.”
Mangiero called the bills the third leg of the metaphorical three-legged stool of crypto legislation, with the other legs including the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act and the market structure-focused Clarity Act (the latter of which, as we all know, is still neck and neck in the legislative process).
“Several provisions of this package reflect priorities we have long advanced: reasonable tax treatment for GENIUS-compliant stablecoins that allows them to function as the payment instruments they are; a de minimis exception for common transaction fees on the network, relief that we have long advocated and which we believe should be further expanded as the process continues; parity provisions expanding securities lending, mark-to-market, and treatment of charitable deductions to widely traded digital assets; and clear rules for the taxation of mining and staking rewards,” she said. said.
In semi-related news, the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Investor Advisory Committee also met late last month to discuss, among other issues, whether stablecoins can be treated as cash equivalents.
The committee believes there needs to be a “high threshold” for establishing something as a cash equivalent, according to a meeting summary shared with CoinDesk. Committee members did not reach consensus on what type of information would be useful to investors.
Possible disclosures include how reserves are structured, the type of stablecoin, who the issuer is, where the funds are held, disaggregated information on cash equivalents and foreign exchange risk and even whether the information disclosed was made on a provisional basis.
The committee will meet again in November.
Tuesday
- 6:00 p.m. UTC (2:00 p.m. ET): The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing to discuss crypto tax policy.
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