The Blockchain Association, a Washington trade group for crypto companies, wrote to the four leaders of Congress on Thursday 22 October asking them to pass a bipartisan crypto tax bill. The letter, signed by chief policy officer Lindsay Fraser and sent to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, asks for a small-transaction exemption, cash treatment for stablecoins and tax on staking rewards only when they are sold, according to the group’s release.
What it does not do is endorse a bill. Two recent texts are on the table: the House Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, approved by the Ways and Means Committee in September, and the Senate ADAPT Act introduced by Steve Daines. The association names neither in its release, and Bitcoin Magazine, which reported on the letter, says it backs neither.
The timing is tight. Congress is in recess until after the 3 November midterms, the 119th Congress ends on 3 January 2027, and any bill that has not passed by then must start again. One of the Senate’s most active crypto backers, Cynthia Lummis, said on 1 October she would be surprised if any crypto tax measure got through in the lame-duck session.
“Americans who use digital assets aren’t asking for special treatment,” Fraser said in the release. The group also launched a website, TaxClarityforAmerica.com, where people can write to their members of Congress.
Why the crypto lobby turned to a crypto tax bill now
The letter comes five weeks after the industry’s market structure bill stalled in the Senate. The Clarity Act passed the House 294 to 134 in July 2025. In the Senate, a procedural vote on 15 September 2026 failed 49 to 50, with every Democrat and three Republicans (Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran) voting no, according to Bitcoin Magazine. Thom Tillis switched to no so that he could later move to reconsider, which keeps the bill alive on paper. Our earlier piece explains how the SEC and CFTC are writing crypto rules while the Clarity Act is stuck.
Tax is different. It is the one crypto file where a bill has already cleared a committee in this Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act (H.R. 10357) on 16 September, one day after the Senate vote, by 38 votes to 5. The association’s letter asks Congress to keep going on that track, on its own terms.
The group says 67 million Americans hold and use digital assets. That figure is the association’s own; the release does not say how it was counted.
What the Blockchain Association is asking for
The letter rests on the association’s Digital Asset Tax Principles, which the release says were first published in February and drafted with input from more than 100 of its members. They are grouped under eight headings. The concrete requests, as the release lists them, are:
- a “meaningful” de minimis exemption for small transactions, with no dollar figure given;
- stablecoins treated as cash for tax purposes;
- mining and staking rewards treated as self-created property and taxed on disposition, that is when they are sold or spent, not when they are received;
- reporting rules that protect taxpayer privacy while still serving enforcement;
- a safe harbor for foreign persons trading on US exchanges;
- wash-sale gaps closed without catching everyday use of crypto;
- no tax event for transactions that do not change a holder’s economic exposure;
- access to crypto in retirement accounts, an optional mark-to-market method and charitable gifts without heavy appraisal rules;
- blockchain development counted as research for the R&D tax credit.
Bitcoin Magazine’s summary of the letter adds one point that is not in the release: broker reporting limited to firms that hold customer assets. That would largely confirm the current federal framework. President Trump signed a resolution overturning the IRS rule on DeFi brokers on 10 April 2025, and the IRS says its broker rules leave out decentralized or non-custodial brokers that never take possession of the assets.
Two of the asks cut against what a reader might expect from an industry lobby. The association wants the wash-sale rule applied to crypto, which would end a tax strategy many holders use today. It also asks for privacy in reporting just as the first broker tax forms for crypto have gone out.
The House crypto tax bill: $10 fee relief, staking taxed on receipt
H.R. 10357 is a broader tax package than its name suggests. According to EY’s account of the 16 September markup, its crypto provisions:
- exempt from gain or loss crypto spent on network or transaction fees, when those fees total $10 or less and the taxpayer made no more than 5,000 digital asset transactions in the year;
- extend the wash-sale and constructive-sale rules to digital assets;
- allow mark-to-market accounting for digital asset brokers and dealers;
- open safe harbors that make it easier for foreign persons to invest;
- simplify the rules for donating crypto to charity;
- treat income from validation activities, which covers mining and staking, as ordinary income.
Bitcoin Magazine adds that qualified dollar stablecoins are exempt from the new wash-sale rule. The bill also carries an unrelated item: the text of the FULL HOUSE Act, which would restore a full deduction of gambling losses against winnings, reversing the 90% cap set by last year’s budget law, EY reports.
The five no votes were all Democrats: Lloyd Doggett, Judy Chu, Gwen Moore, Don Beyer and Dwight Evans. Chu called the small-fee exemption costly, putting it at $2.3 billion, and argued it may mainly help wealthy crypto owners, according to EY. An amendment on DeFi broker reporting was defeated, and one from Doggett barring public officials and their families from profiting from crypto was ruled out of order.
The gap the association’s letter points at is staking. An earlier House proposal, Rep. Mike Carey’s H.R. 9175, would have let miners and stakers wait until they sell. Bitcoin Magazine reports it was dropped from the committee text released on 14 September, so the House bill keeps taxing staking rewards when they arrive. That is how the IRS already treats them: Revenue Ruling 2023-14 counts staking rewards as income in the year the holder gains control of them, at their market value on that date. Rep. Steven Horsford, a Democrat who voted yes, said the question remains open.
The Senate side: ADAPT, S. 2207 and a reluctant Finance Committee
In the Senate, Steve Daines introduced the ADAPT Act on 30 September with Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Moreno and Tim Scott as cosponsors, according to Bitcoin Magazine. It would make purchases paid with payment stablecoins issued under the GENIUS Act free of gain or loss, apply the same $10 fee threshold as the House, and bring in wash-sale rules with grandfathering for coins already held and exemptions for mining and staking rewards. It sits in committee.
The stablecoin piece ties the tax bill to the GENIUS Act framework that regulators are now writing; the first of those rules is in our report on the OCC’s final GENIUS Act rule.
Lummis has her own bill, S. 2207, filed in 2025: a $300 exemption per transaction, capped at $5,000 a year. It has not moved out of the Finance Committee. Lummis retires in January 2027.
Her own forecast is gloomy. “So it will surprise me if anything tax-related on digital assets gets done in the lame duck,” Lummis said, as quoted by Crypto Briefing on 1 October. Finance Committee members are reluctant to reopen the tax code after the election, and some worry that amendments would pull the bill away from last year’s tax law, the outlet reported.
There was also an earlier bipartisan attempt. In December 2025, Reps. Max Miller and Steven Horsford released a discussion draft, the Digital Asset PARITY Act, with a capital-gains exemption for small payments in regulated dollar stablecoins, up to $200, and an option to defer tax on staking rewards for five years. It was published as a draft for comment, and the September House text did not take up its staking deferral.
Crypto tax bills compared
| Text | Small-transaction relief | Staking and mining | Wash-sale rule | Status (23 October 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H.R. 10357, Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act (House) | Fees of $10 or less, up to 5,000 transactions a year | Ordinary income on receipt | Extended to crypto; dollar stablecoins exempt | Approved by Ways and Means 38-5 on 16 September; no floor vote |
| ADAPT Act (Senate, Daines) | Purchases with GENIUS stablecoins; $10 fee threshold | Exempt from the wash-sale rule | Extended, with grandfathering | Introduced 30 September; in committee |
| S. 2207 (Senate, Lummis) | $300 per transaction, $5,000 a year | Not covered by the sources | Not covered by the sources | In the Finance Committee since 2025 |
| PARITY Act draft (Miller, Horsford) | Dollar stablecoin payments up to $200 | Optional five-year deferral for staking | Not covered by the sources | Discussion draft, December 2025 |
| Blockchain Association principles | “Meaningful” exemption, no figure | Taxed at sale | Gaps closed, everyday use spared | Letter sent 22 October |
Sources: EY, Bitcoin Magazine, Crypto Briefing, The Block, Blockchain Association.
What is missing for an ordinary holder
Side by side, the texts leave one request out. Neither the House nor the Senate bill exempts a small purchase paid in bitcoin, the measure the industry pushed at the Bitcoin 2026 conference, Bitcoin Magazine notes. The House relief covers fees, not purchases. The Senate relief covers stablecoins, not bitcoin. The Bitcoin Policy Institute and others argue that any de minimis rule should include bitcoin.
For a US holder, that means buying a coffee with bitcoin would still be a taxable sale under both bills, with a gain or loss to compute. Paying for it with a qualifying dollar stablecoin would not be under ADAPT, if it ever became law.
Staking is the second gap. Under the House text, rewards would still count as income on the day they land in the wallet, valued at that day’s price, with a second tax event when they are sold. The association’s letter asks for one tax event, at sale.
The third is the wash-sale rule. Today it applies to stocks and securities, while the IRS treats crypto as property, so a holder can sell at a loss, buy the same coin back at once and book the loss. Both bills would end that, and the association agrees, but asks that the rule not catch routine spending. Readers new to the subject can start with our guide to stablecoins, the asset that gets the most generous treatment in every text.
What the IRS already requires on Form 1099-DA
While Congress debates, reporting has started. US brokers must report gross proceeds for crypto transactions carried out on or after 1 January 2025, and cost basis for certain transactions from 1 January 2026, the IRS says. The 2025 forms were therefore the first Forms 1099-DA, sent this year. Under Notice 2024-56, brokers that made a good faith effort on those 2025 forms face no penalty.
A missing form changes nothing for the holder. Digital asset transactions must be reported “whether or not they result in a taxable gain or loss”, the IRS says, and that includes trades on foreign exchanges that send no 1099-DA.
What can still happen before 3 January
The House bill is the only vehicle close to the floor, and Congress is out until after 3 November. Bitcoin Magazine, citing Punchbowl News, wrote that the association’s refusal to back either bill signals the industry wants more than Congress has produced. Coindaro has not seen Punchbowl’s report.
For anything to pass, the House would need a floor vote in the lame-duck weeks. Then the Senate would have to agree on a text that its Finance Committee members do not want to open, and both chambers would have to settle their differences on stablecoins and staking. If that does not happen by 3 January 2027, every bill named here dies and must be reintroduced in the 120th Congress, without Lummis.
No reply from Thune, Schumer, Johnson or Jeffries had been made public by early Friday 23 October.
JPMorgan: regulators can only partly fill the gap
A JPMorgan note, reported by The Block on the same day, explains why the industry still wants laws rather than rules. Analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote that recent moves by US regulators are “partly offsetting the negative impact from the Senate’s failure to advance the Clarity Act”, according to The Block’s account of the note, which we have not seen.
“Only legislation would make the framework more durable over the longer term,” the analysts wrote, as quoted by The Block. They warned of “a patchwork of regulatory actions that could be overturned in as soon as two years, if a Democrat wins the White House”. The bank does not expect the Clarity Act to pass in 2026 and sees a possible return in 2027, The Block reports.
The note lists the measures doing the work in the meantime, per The Block: the SEC’s five-year “Innovation Exemption” for tokenized stocks, granted in September; early CFTC work on leveraged crypto trading on regulated US platforms, which the analysts think is unlikely to advance before 2027; OCC national trust charters for stablecoin issuers and crypto firms, which the Independent Community Bankers of America has challenged in court; and a FASB proposal to let companies count some stablecoins as cash equivalents, open for comment until 19 November.
None of those measures touches taxes. The tax treatment of a staking reward, or of a coffee bought with bitcoin, is written in the Internal Revenue Code, and only Congress can amend it.
Dates to watch
- 3 November 2026: US midterm elections; Congress returns afterwards.
- 19 November 2026: FASB comment deadline on stablecoins as cash equivalents.
- 3 January 2027: the 119th Congress ends; H.R. 10357, ADAPT and S. 2207 lapse if not passed.
- January 2027: the new Congress convenes; Lummis leaves the Senate.