Crypto Week Comes Back to Life with Stablecoin Bill Set for House Vote

It’s not every week that a sector with a checkered past gets the regulatory green light in the U.S.

But it may end up being true this week, as the cryptocurrency sector’s “Crypto Week” legislative sprint pushes major crypto bills — GENIUS (stablecoin regulation), CLARITY (digital asset classification), and the Anti-CBDC Act — forward.

Speaker Mike Johnson has reportedly said he expects to vote on the GENIUS Act, a set of Senate-approved rules for stablecoins Thursday (July 17), while a vote on the CLARITY crypto markets framework could see its own vote pushed to next week .

Still, “Crypto Week,” true to its name, has been a volatile one, with a coalition of hardline right-wing policymakers staging a multi-day, intra-party mutiny. The Congressional Rules-making process that was meant to be a mere formality instead devolved into political infighting.

On Tuesday (July 15), over a dozen Republicans voted against the motion to move forward with holding a vote on the three crypto bills, citing concerns about the GENIUS Act’s treatment of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) and engaging in politicking to stop key procedural steps.

By Wednesday (July 16), the lawmakers remained stuck in a standoff, with the GOP hardline faction demanding that a provision banning a federally issued CBDC stablecoin now be packaged with the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act.

After respectively huddling Wednesday night, the House voted 217-212 to advance the crypto bills. But the process wasn’t pretty, or quick, and followed a closed-door standoff between House GOP members and the leaders of the Financial Services and Agriculture committees that lasted more than nine hours.

None of the House Democrats voted yes to move forward with the crypto bills.

Read more: Crypto Week Policy Playbook for CFOs

What Crypto Legislation Means for Banks, Payments, and the Back Office

The GOP wrench thrown in Crypto Week at first appeared to be smoothed over by President Trump, who met Tuesday night with the holdouts from his own party. Trump later posted on his social media platform that he had convinced them all to support the measure.

“Our dealmaker-in-chief,” tweeted White House A.I. & Crypto Czar David Sacks on X, in response to the news.

But that all unraveled Wednesday afternoon during a 4 p.m. House Rules Committee vote that would run until nearly midnight.

While GOP leaders reportedly were ready to agree to the demands of House members to combine the anti-CBDC measure with the CLARITY Act regulating digital asset markets, the plan drew opposition from the leaders of the Financial Services and Agriculture committees who crafted the crypto bills and believe combining them would spell doom for both bills.

That led to the midnight-hour agreement to ban government-issued digital dollars as part of the defense authorization bill.

If enacted, the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts could lay the foundation for more robust institutional adoption of stablecoins and other blockchain-based financial instruments, while also reshaping operational, compliance, and settlement frameworks for financial institutions and their partners.

The GENIUS Act has already been passed by the Senate and would go to Trump’s desk to be signed into law if it is ultimately passed by the House.

Both the CLARITY act, which covered crypto market structure and oversight, and a third bill aiming to block the Federal Reserve from launching a direct-to-consumer digital dollar (the anti-CBDC bill) are being readied for a vote by the Senate.

The bills still face hurdles, with CLARITY needing Senate approval, but the direction is clear: federal lawmakers are finally drawing up a playbook for digital assets. And while crypto headlines usually spotlight tech or trading, the real story here is what it means for banks, payments firms, and the operational engine rooms of the financial system.

“Corporate treasurers should pay close attention. A national stablecoin framework could enable digital cash management with instant settlement and automated reconciliation. But without unified custodianship and accounting standards, the back office will stay stuck in the analog past,” Trevor Koverko, Co-Founder at Sapien, told PYMNTS.

Regulatory clarity removes a huge amount of risk, and would allow banks to consider issuing their own stablecoins, holding them on balance sheets, or integrating them into payments and treasury services.

Large firms like JPMorgan and Citi are already exploring these rails, as PYMNTS has covered. This legislation gives the rest of the industry permission to catch up.

Read more: 4 Questions CFOs Need to Ask as Wall Street Embraces Stablecoins

What This Means for Payments Infrastructure

Stablecoins promise faster settlement, lower costs, and programmable money that moves 24/7. For payments providers, this could reshape everything from how merchants get paid to how B2B invoices are settled.

“Passage of the GENIUS Act on stablecoins would be a game-changer for the payments sector. Expect mainstream adoption of regulated stablecoins, leading to faster, cheaper cross-border payments and new payment products,” Stephen Aschettino, Partner in the Financial Innovation & Regulation practice at Steptoe, told PYMNTS in an interview.

Could and would being the operative words, of course. The opportunity is real, but so is the complexity. Firms may need to assess integration points, update fraud and AML monitoring, and rethink treasury and reconciliation workflows.

And while the CLARITY Act doesn’t directly touch stablecoins, it does something just as important: it gives crypto assets regulatory definition. Until now, digital asset companies (and the banks that support them) have had to guess whether tokens are securities (regulated by the SEC), commodities (CFTC), or something else entirely. That uncertainty has created a patchwork of litigation, enforcement actions, and lost opportunities.

The CLARITY Act could expand the range of acceptable digital asset partnerships, especially for tokenization use cases.

“If passed, the CLARITY Act would be a major breakthrough for the crypto industry in the U.S. It addresses some of the sector’s longest-standing concerns by creating clearer rules and reducing regulatory ambiguity… That kind of clarity could go a long way in making compliance more predictable,” Anthony Georgiades, general partner at Innovating Capital, told PYMNTS in an interview.