US Lawmakers Hope for Stablecoin Bill This Year

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Patrick Toomey and Cynthia Lummis are reportedly working on legislation that would establish regulations for stablecoins and hope to get it in front of Congress before a new session begins in 2023.

Such a bill would be one piece of the larger digital asset oversight effort that Gillibrand and Lummis have worked on this year, CoinDesk reported Wednesday (Nov. 16).

“This bill we’re working on now — and we hope to introduce it in the next few weeks — would be a comprehensive stablecoin bill that we would ask to at least get a hearing in [the Senate Banking Committee] and maybe get a vote by the end of the Congress,” Gillibrand said during a Blockchain Association event in Washington, per the report.

A stablecoin is a type of currency pegged one-to-one to a specific fiat currency. The main and safest way to do this is for the issuer to create a reserve of that fiat currency or highly liquid investments (like short-term U.S. treasuries) that back the stablecoin, giving users confidence that they can always redeem one stablecoin for a dollar (or euro, or ounce of gold, or whatever).

It is generally agreed among federal lawmakers that stablecoins are a sector of the cryptocurrency industry that may be one they can get a handle on before expanding their oversight to the rest of the industry, according to the Wednesday report by CoinDesk.

As PYMNTS reported in June, when Gillibrand and Lummis revealed that their bipartisan bill creating a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies would define most digital assets as commodities instead of securities, the response was predictable.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was ecstatic and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) aghast.

Both have thrown elbows as the political debate over who should regulate the crypto industry came to a boil over the past year.