New Stablecoin Bill Drafted by House Republicans as Compromise With Democrats

The Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee has released a new draft of the leading U.S. legislative proposal for overseeing stablecoins, and it includes some of the positions of Democratic lawmakers.

The bill posted Thursday is still just a draft, meant to be further discussed at a June 13 committee hearing, but it marks another potential move toward a bipartisan negotiation on the legislation that many believe could be the easiest way to take a first step toward U.S. regulation of crypto.

This considerably shorter new draft is meant to start melding some of the two parties’ positions, according to a committee spokesperson, and also adds further points from Republican committee members. This version would call for the Fed to write requirements for issuing stablecoins but would still let state regulators oversee the companies issuing the tokens.

It gives the Fed a few additional authorities of the Republican’s previous bill, including a power in emergency situations to intervene against state-regulated issuers. States could also pass their supervision duties over to the federal watchdog.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), has considered stablecoin legislation a priority since last year, before he took over the committee. When he won the gavel, he continued the work, though Democrats had complained that Republicans were re-writing the bill without their input. They later released their own version. The narrow scope of the bill and its past bipartisan support had been the strengths of the effort to date, but it’s not yet clear what Democrats think of the latest version.

The bill, were it introduced and passed by both chambers of Congress, would establish the first U.S. regulations for stablecoins – tokens tied to steady assets such as the dollar that are widely used in crypto markets for trading in and out of more volatile coins.

The new draft also cuts an earlier section calling for research on the merits of a digital dollar, an increasingly controversial idea criticized by Republicans, despite the Federal Reserve insisting it hasn’t taken a position on whether such a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is warranted for the U.S.