Senators Postpone Crypto Market Bill as Coinbase Flexes Its Muscle in Washington

On Wednesday evening, the Senate Banking Committee delayed final discussions around a bill for creating greater regulatory clarity for crypto in the United States, fittingly known as the Clarity Act. The decision came as Coinbase CEO and deep-pocketed political donor Brian Armstrong went public with his complaints about the bill.

The Senate Agriculture Committee had also already pushed back their debates around their version of the bill until January 27th. Both committees were originally scheduled to have markups on their respective versions of the bill on Thursday.

Once finalized, both versions will be combined and voted on by the entire Senate. The House already passed its version of the Clarity Act last year, so the bill would go directly to President Trump’s desk for his final signature once it passes the Senate.

Notably, the Senate Banking Committee’s decision to push back deliberations over the crypto market structure bill came after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared his disapproval of the Senate Banking Committee’s draft version of the bill on X. “We appreciate all the hard work by members of the Senate to reach a bi-partisan outcome, but this version would be materially worse than the current status quo,” said Armstrong. “We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft.”

Armstrong later added that he’s optimistic that a better bill can be drafted, and Coinbase will continue to work with everyone to make that happen. According to a report from Wall Street firm Benchmark, the move by Armstrong may be more of a negotiating tactic than anything else.

After reviewing the Senate Banking draft text over the last 48hrs, Coinbase unfortunately can’t support the bill as written.

There are too many issues, including:

– A defacto ban on tokenized equities
– DeFi prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial…

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) January 14, 2026

Coinbase and other members of the crypto industry are seeking regulatory clarity from the federal government regarding crypto, as they feel it was not provided by the Biden administration. Former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is generally viewed as a villain among many crypto proponents, as the SEC policy under his reign was effectively that every crypto asset besides bitcoin was operating as an unregistered security. That said, there was a sharp reversal of this stance near the end of Biden’s term, as exchange-traded funds for Ethereum were approved.

Key areas of interest in the new bill for the crypto industry include the tokenization of stocks and other traditional assets, clear guidelines on when a crypto asset is considered a security, and protections for developers who do not take custody of their users’ assets. While stablecoins received more clarity from the GENIUS Act last year, traditional banks now want to see alterations to those guidelines so as to not put themselves at a competitive disadvantage to the emerging crypto sector.

Indeed, members of Congress are effectively dealing with competing lobbyists from both the crypto and traditional banking sectors and trying to find a way to make everyone happy, according to CoinDesk. According to Open Secrets, the crypto lobby dumped $133 million into the 2024 election cycle in an attempt to gain more favorable regulation from Washington, and now it’s time for the industry to get a return on that investment.

I’ve spoken with leaders across the crypto industry, the financial sector, and my Democratic and Republican colleagues, and everyone remains at the table working in good faith.

As we take a brief pause before moving to a markup, this market structure bill reflects months of…

— Senator Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) January 15, 2026

Developer protections are an area of interest for crypto users, particularly those who are philosophically aligned with the original ethos of decentralization and permissionless finance that underpinned Bitcoin’s original creation. The developers behind privacy-focused bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet recently received four and five year prison sentences for developing software that allowed users to mix their bitcoin with others in an effort to mask the origin of funds.

While the former CEO of crypto exchange Binance received a pardon from President Trump for a sentence related to his involvement in relaxed anti-money laundering standards at his exchange, the Samourai Wallet developers have yet to receive similar treatment from the president. Notably, the pardon of the Binance CEO has been described as unprecedented corruption by a former DOJ official due to Binance’s holdings of a Trump-affiliated stablecoin, known as USD1, that effectively generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the issuer of the stablecoin. The lack of a pardon for the Samourai Wallet developers so far creates an awkward situation for the president due to the optics in the context of the pardon for the former crypto exchange CEO. That said, President Trump previously said he would look into a potential pardon for the Samourai Wallet developers.

The potential lack of protections for non-custodial wallet developers in the crypto regulation bill has been a worry for some months now. And the potential lack of such protections, in addition to a lack of a de minimis tax exemption for bitcoin payments, would provide more support for the argument that the election of Trump has mainly empowered large crypto institutions (and himself) rather than the individual users involved in the so-called democratization of finance.

For now, non-profit crypto advocacy group Coin Center has stated, “While a small number of issues remain . . . we are very encouraged by the tremendous progress made by Senate Banking.”