The White House is targeting July 4 for Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, said Wednesday at CoinDesk’s Miami Consensus Conference.
“We’re aiming for the Fourth of July. I think it would be a great birthday present to America, celebrating our 250th anniversary,” Witt said. The mechanisms, according to Witt, are: a Senate Banking Committee bump this month, four weeks of Senate work in June for floor passage, and enough runway for a vote by the U.S. House of Representatives before the Independence Day deadline.
That timeline is ahead of the prediction that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shared on the same stage earlier in the day, when the New York Democrat predicted that Clarity would reach the president’s desk by the first week of August.
“There’s not a lot of slack left in the rope right now,” Witt said. “But it’s an achievable timeline.”
The path to markup opened when Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) released a compromise on the bill’s stablecoin yield provisions in early May, banning bank deposit-equivalent yield on stablecoins while leaving room for spending rewards. Witt said the White House convened banks and crypto companies to shape the language, then handed it to senators, who conducted their own process and arrived at text that both sides found equally unsatisfactory.
“Crypto is unhappy, banks are unhappy, but they are both equally unhappy,” Witt said. “So we know we’ve found the right compromise.” Witt considered that the question of the stable yield of coins “is closed.”
The White House is also close to reaching an agreement on the conflict of interest provision that divides Democrats and the administration. Witt said the negotiating posture is to accept rules that apply “at every level, from the president all the way down to the newest intern on Capitol Hill,” but reject anything that singles out a particular position or office holder. “We will not allow the targeting of anyone’s family or any particular politician,” he said. “I’m optimistic that we’re going to be able to close this out.”
Speaking on what would happen if Clarity goes beyond 2026, Witt said: “If we don’t set the standard, if we don’t write the rules, then we’re going to follow the rules, and we’re going to follow someone else’s rules on this.” And God forbid, China ultimately writes these rules. »
American leadership in global capital markets, he added, is one of the elements that “sustains American hegemony.”
Witt also discussed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, the stablecoin issuer law passed last year, where rulemaking by the Treasury Department, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other agencies are closing in on a one-year deadline in July.
“These are complex issues. They require following the Administrative Procedure Act and soliciting comments. And we received a flood of comments,” Witt said. The law, he added, illustrates “the effective frontier of regulation: just enough to allow an industry to thrive…but not so much that it overloads an innovation and renders it useless.”
