US Senate crypto bill collapses amid partisan deadlock

A push for landmark US cryptocurrency legislation collapsed on Tuesday after Republicans and Democrats in Congress failed to bridge months-old differences over ethics, banking and how the fast-growing industry should be regulated.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance to a debate in the Senate, with safeguards governing President Donald Trump’s extensive crypto interests among the biggest obstacles to a deal.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said the bill posed “massive risks to families, our national security, and our economy.”

“And if that’s not bad enough, while Americans across the country suffer from an affordability crisis, this bill will turbocharge President Donald Trump’s ability to rake in billions and billions of dollars from crypto,” she said.

The defeat dealt a major blow to efforts to establish the first comprehensive federal framework for digital-asset markets — and offered another illustration of Congress’s struggle to keep pace with disruptive new technologies as lawmakers wrestle with a similarly fraught debate over artificial intelligence.

The more than 600-page legislation would have divided oversight largely between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, replacing a regulatory patchwork that has shifted between administrations.