Insight: US Senate Cryptocurrency Market Structure Bill Delayed, Regulatory Uncertainty Heats Up, Related Assets Under Pressure

BlockBeats News, January 17th, Galaxy Digital's Head of Research, Alex Thorn, stated that the scheduled Senate Banking Committee hearing on the crypto market structure bill has been postponed, highlighting deep-seated divisions between Congress and the industry on multiple key issues, particularly focusing on the stablecoin yield mechanism and DeFi-related provisions.

This delay comes after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong withdrew his support for the bill hours earlier. Armstrong publicly opposed the bill's language around tokenized securities, DeFi restrictions, and stablecoin yields. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott then announced the postponement of the hearing but has not yet disclosed a new schedule. With the Senate recess next week, the earliest resumption could be between January 26th and 30th.

Alex Thorn pointed out that within just 48 hours, the draft bill was released late at night, over 100 amendments were submitted, stakeholders continued to discover new points of contention at the last minute, and the political coordination difficulty significantly increased.

On the market front, after the postponement news was announced, crypto assets generally trended lower, with Bitcoin and Ethereum falling by about 2% on the day; related U.S. stocks were under pressure simultaneously, with Coinbase falling by 6.5%, Robinhood by 7.8%, and Circle by 9.7%.

In his analysis, Thorn believes that although there has been a significant consensus on the "market structure" itself, highly sensitive non-core issues such as stablecoin yields, DeFi compliance, and granting the SEC regulatory tools in the tokenized securities field have formed insurmountable political rifts. "The surface gap of the disagreement is small, but the substantive gap is deep."