Congressmen Steven Horsford (Democrat of Nevada) and Max Miller (Republican of Ohio) reintroduced their Digital Asset Protection, Accountability, Regulation, Innovation, Taxation, and Returns (PARITY) Act late last month, seeking to update how the United States approaches crypto and taxes.
Congress will address taxes (in general) in the coming months, and crypto could be one of them. This is very important for anyone in the United States who owns cryptocurrency, as they will need to report their digital asset holdings and transactions.
The PARITY Act was first released as a discussion draft last December and reissued on March 26 for further review.
The most immediately visible change appears to be the section dealing with “de minimis” gains. De minimis exemptions generally allow certain transactions to be exempt from tax reporting. With such an exemption, people do not have to report the transaction or worry about the tax burden that might otherwise arise.
The industry has long sought a de minimis exemption for small transactions, which could make it easier for individuals to do things like buy coffee without having to report a capital gain or loss on the crypto used in that transaction. The December 2025 version of the PARITY Act began with a section addressing de minimis exemptions for payments made via “regulated payment stablecoins,” with a note indicating that the threshold would be $200.
Although the section does not appear to extend these exemptions to digital assets like Bitcoin the note goes on to say that it is referring to stablecoins specifically because of the GENIUS Act.
The March 2026 version of the text did not explicitly say that there should be a de minimis exemption, but parts of it seemed to address this concern:
“In the case of any sale of a payment-regulated stablecoin, no gain or loss will be recognized on such sale unless the taxpayer’s basis in such stablecoin is less than 99 percent of the redemption value of such stablecoin,” the bill states. It removed the $200 threshold and created a deemed base of $1 for exchanges, which are separate from stablecoin sales.
The latest bill would also apply wash sale rules to digital asset transactions, which isn’t a particularly controversial position — Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) even included wash sale provisions in her tax bill last year.
This bill would also distinguish between “passive staking” and activities like trading.
It’s unclear what the next steps for this bill might be; Although there is talk of a tax reconciliation bill and US President Donald Trump has revealed his budget requests for fiscal year 2027, it is far from certain that the reconciliation bill will happen or that crypto will be a part of it.
Nonetheless, conversations with industry players over the past few weeks suggest that there will be a strong push to include crypto in any tax legislation that may become law.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally submitted as part of CoinDesk’s State of Crypto newsletter earlier this month.
