The House of Representatives passed a cryptocurrency bill on Thursday that was months in the works and that conservative Republicans had held up for days this week.
The GENIUS Act, which was passed by a vote of 308-122 and had 102 Democrats vote with Republicans in support of it, will now head to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature. Trump had given Congress a deadline of August to get cryptocurrency legislation to his desk.
House Republican leadership managed to get the GENIUS Act to the floor only after two days of negotiations with Republican hard-liners who voted against advancing the legislation on Tuesday. They demanded that the GENIUS Act be packaged with two other pieces of legislation aimed at regulating digital assets and sent back to the Senate, but eventually settled for giving each piece of legislation a separate floor vote.
“There were certainly moments yesterday where people were projecting pessimism on the Hill. This group never got pessimistic,” Rep. Dusty Johnson told NOTUS immediately after the vote, referring to himself and Reps. Bryan Steil and Glenn Thompson, who led the negotiations. “We just knew that we were going to continue to work it. This bill was too strong, and made too much sense for it to get caught up.”
Senate and House leadership managed to strike a deal with GOP holdouts while a procedural vote was kept open for more than nine hours, a new record, on Wednesday, getting their “crypto week” back on track. Republican leaders promised to add language that would ban the Federal Reserve from issuing central bank digital currencies to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which is a must-pass bill.
“We were absolutely confident we would get to ‘yes.’ But it’s a process. It’s called legislating,” Thompson said.
Immediately after passing the GENIUS Act, along with two other cryptocurrency bills that still need to pass in the Senate, Republican leadership began celebrating.
“For far too long, America’s digital assets industry has been stifled by ambiguous rules, confusing enforcement, and the Biden administration’s anti-crypto crusade,” Majority Whip Tom Emmer said. “President Trump and this Congress are correcting course and unleashing America’s digital assets potential with historic transformative legislation.”
The GENIUS Act, the first cryptocurrency regulation ever passed by both chambers of Congress, is intended to codify payments made with stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency tied to physical assets like the dollar, and give federal regulators power over them. It passed in the Senate last month.
While the GENIUS Act sailed through the Senate with bipartisan support, it required lengthy bipartisan negotiations to include a series of consumer protection amendments to get the bill through. Eighteen Senate Democrats ended up voting for the bill, while others in the party said that it lacked key anti-corruption provisions that would bar the president, vice-president and their families from profiting from their own stablecoins.
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Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with additional reporting.