The Blockchain Association is pressing congressional leaders to advance bipartisan legislation covering digital-asset taxation, despite limited time remaining before the current Congress ends and major uncertainty surrounding broader crypto legislation.
According to Bitcoin Magazine, the industry group sent a letter on Thursday to Senate and House leaders asking for action on tax rules affecting the 67 million Americans who hold digital assets. The letter was signed by Lindsay Fraser, the association’s chief policy officer, and addressed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The association also launched TaxClarityforAmerica.com, a website designed to help constituents contact their representatives. Its proposals focus on reducing uncertainty around everyday digital-asset transactions, stablecoins, mining, staking and reporting requirements.
What the industry wants
The group’s requests include a de minimis exemption for small transactions, meaning limited tax relief for low-value purchases or transfers. It also wants qualified stablecoin payments to receive cash-like tax treatment, so that routine spending would not create a capital gain or loss each time a transaction is made.
For miners and stakers, the association is seeking taxation when rewards are sold rather than when they are received. Under the House proposal currently under consideration, validation rewards would instead be treated as ordinary income at the time they are received.
Other requests include limiting broker reporting obligations to companies that hold customer assets and designing wash-sale rules that prevent abusive loss harvesting without capturing ordinary transactions. Wash-sale rules generally restrict the use of investment losses for tax purposes when an investor buys back the same or a substantially identical asset within a specified period.
The letter additionally calls for a safe harbor for foreign traders using U.S. exchanges, a mark-to-market election and eligibility for research and development credits for blockchain development. However, the association did not endorse either of the two main tax bills currently in play.
The letter also asks for a “meaningful” exemption for small transactions but does not specify a dollar amount. That omission is significant because neither chamber’s current bill includes the small-bitcoin-purchase exemption that industry representatives highlighted at Bitcoin 2026.
House and Senate proposals remain incomplete
The House Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, H.R. 10357, one day after the Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act. The 114-page House package would exempt network fees below $10 from capital-gains reporting, although the exemption would not apply to taxpayers who made more than 5,000 transfers in the previous year.
It would also extend wash-sale and constructive-sale rules to digital assets. Qualified dollar stablecoins would be excluded from the wash-sale provision.
The package does not include the mining and staking relief sought by the industry. Rep. Mike Carey’s Tax Clarity for Mining and Staking Act, H.R. 9175, had appeared in an earlier discussion draft but was omitted from the committee’s version released on September 14. Instead, the House bill classifies validation rewards as ordinary income when received.
Rep. Steven Horsford, who had proposed limiting a potential deferral to five years, supported the package and said the issue remained open for additional work. The Blockchain Association, Crypto Council for Innovation and Digital Chamber had previously asked the committee to pass the mining and staking bill without changes.
The Senate’s ADAPT Act was introduced on September 30 by Sen. Steve Daines, with Sens. Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Moreno and Tim Scott as cosponsors. The proposal would exempt purchases made with GENIUS Act stablecoins from gains or losses, use the same $10 threshold for fees, and apply wash-sale rules with grandfathering for existing holdings and exemptions for mining and staking rewards. It remains in committee.
Sen. Lummis’s earlier proposal, S. 2207, has been in the Finance Committee since June 2025. It includes a $300 per-transaction de minimis exemption, capped at $5,000 annually. Neither Senate measure currently provides the broader bitcoin-purchase exemption sought by some industry advocates.
A narrow window for action
Congress is in recess until after the November 3 midterm elections. Once lawmakers return, the 119th Congress will have only a brief lame-duck session, while government funding and other legislative priorities compete for floor time.
The timetable is further complicated by Lummis’s planned retirement in January 2027, removing one of the Senate’s most prominent advocates for digital-asset tax changes.
The stalled Clarity Act has also reshaped the industry’s strategy. The market-structure bill passed the House by 294 votes to 134 in July 2025 but remained blocked in the Senate for more than a year. A cloture vote on September 15 failed 49-50. No Democrat supported the motion, while Republicans Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran voted against it. Sen. Thom Tillis changed his vote so he could file a motion to reconsider, leaving the measure technically alive but with little practical momentum.
With market-structure legislation stalled, tax legislation may offer a narrower route forward. The House tax package received bipartisan committee support, and its wash-sale provisions could generate revenue, potentially making them easier to attach to a broader legislative vehicle. Still, the association’s decision not to back either bill indicates that industry representatives believe the current proposals do not go far enough.
In the absence of comprehensive legislation, regulators continue to shape the sector’s rules. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued its final GENIUS Act rule on Wednesday, while the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have continued using rulemaking and enforcement to address market-structure questions.
Current crypto market picture
Moneyiar market data at 23:38-23:39 on October 22, 2026, showed Bitcoin at $81,208.78, down 3.61% over 24 hours and 1.11% over seven days. NEAR Protocol was $4.8603, down 7.08% in 24 hours and 7.34% over seven days.
Lighter traded at $3.4018, down 10.98% over 24 hours but up 12.43% over seven days. Billions Network was priced at $0.013997, down 0.59% over 24 hours and up 10.04% over seven days.
