Author: Jesse Hamilton, CoinDesk; Translated by: Deng Tong, Jinse Finance
Outgoing House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry said he is confident that his crypto legacy will become permanent policy by 2025.
He said the so-called FIT21 encryption bill is now a "consensus product" in the House of Representatives and cannot be ignored.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) vowed that the cryptocurrency industry won’t have to wait long for U.S. regulation now that the U.S. House of Representatives has charted the course.
“ We’re going to have crypto law next year , I can say that with certainty,” House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. McHenry told an audience at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2024 conference on Wednesday. “Crypto policy is inevitable, crypto law is inevitable.”
McHenry, who has been campaigning for crypto legislation in the House, argued that the strong bipartisan support for his 21st Century Financial Innovation and Technology Act (FIT21) last week guaranteed that outcome — more than a third of House Democrats voted in favor despite opposition from the White House. If necessary, he said, the momentum will carry into the next congressional session in 2025 and will deliver the market structure bill and long-awaited legislation to regulate stablecoin issuers.
“The House has essentially reached a consensus,” McHenry said. “That’s a significant achievement that we have to take advantage of and turn into law.”
Meanwhile, the prominent House member, who is retiring from Congress at the end of the year, said he will continue to work to find a way to keep the bill alive this year. While he acknowledged that "the Senate is a more complicated institution," he said he will work to find some way to get the bill across the finish line and onto President Biden's desk before he leaves Congress.
Asked if he had a specific must-pass bill to tie it to, he said, “Anything — that’s what I’m looking forward to.”
Earlier in the day, at the Consensus conference, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), a senior member of the Republican caucus, said cryptocurrency legislation is most likely to succeed by the end of the year, when Congress ends its current session and moves into the next one — the so-called lame duck session.
McHenry's 2025 pledge may be somewhat swayed by the fact that he said something similar at the same Consensus Convention a year ago, but he explained Wednesday that he could not have predicted the chaos of the House Republican leadership battle, which briefly made him speaker pro tempore and effectively stalled legislation.
As U.S. lawmakers and cryptocurrency executives met at the Consensus conference in Austin, Texas, to discuss current events in cryptocurrencies — often criticizing the approach of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler — the regulator issued a new alert Wednesday warning of cryptocurrency scams.
“Fraudsters often exploit innovation and new technologies to commit investment scams, which is the case with investments related to crypto-asset securities,” the agency said in its latest alert.
