For years crypto has brought Republicans and Democrats together around a shared goal: getting regulation right for the millions of Americans who own crypto, the thousands of developers who want to build in the US, and the growing number of businesses — small and large — who are embracing the next phase of financial innovation. There’s clearly more work to do, but we’ve built a strong bipartisan foundation in Congress around protecting consumers, promoting innovation, and ensuring the US leads the future of finance. Next Tuesday, voters will decide who should lead in both Congress and state capitals across the US. Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: candidates in both parties believe crypto is worth fighting for. You don’t need to look any further than @standwithcrypto’s scorecard for proof. Thanks for the great discussion this afternoon, @crypto!

Millions of Americans use digital assets to pay, save, and invest, but our tax code hasn’t kept pace. Everyday transactions can create complex reporting obligations and burdensome compliance costs, leading to lost money and endless forms when tax season rolls around. It's time for Congress to modernize the tax code with clear, workable rules that reflect how digital assets are actually used.

The @USOCC's final GENIUS rule is out, and there's a lot to like. It reads the statute as Congress wrote it, and sets capital by actual risk instead of a one-size formula. That's how you build a durable framework for dollar stablecoins: honor the text, supervise the facts, and let the market compete. Credit to @USComptroller and @SecScottBessent for their dedication to sound policy and landing the rule ahead of schedule.

Americans should be able to participate in new crypto networks from the start, with the information and protections they need to make informed decisions. That’s the goal of @SECGov’s proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, and the comment letter that @coinbase just filed. We’re grateful to @SECPaulSAtkins and the Commission for their vision and their leadership. A few thoughts.🧵

We all owe @patrickjwitt an enormous debt of gratitude for his stalwart leadership in driving forward @POTUS's crypto agenda, and doing so with integrity, tenacity and an unrelenting focus on what's best for the American people and our country's future.

NY Mag's long @SenGillibrand piece ends with Maple the Labradoodle barking at the reporter, which seems about right. The case against the senator: she wants rules for crypto, while the experts quoted would rather hope "no one uses these things," in a market already measured in trillions. That's not a regulatory philosophy, and it doesn't protect a single consumer. It's wishcasting.

The FSB’s (@FinStbBoard) new report to the G20 recognizes stablecoins’ potential to make payments faster, cheaper, and more transparent, expand financial inclusion, and enable 24/7 cross-border transactions. The report, however, focuses heavily on risks - from runs and reserve pressures to regulatory fragmentation and data gaps. That’s the FSB’s job, and these are legitimate concerns that sound regulation can address. But the missing piece is a serious assessment of the benefits. The G20’s own cross-border payments roadmap sets ambitious 2027 targets for cost, speed, access, and transparency that the current system is not on track to meet. Stablecoins offer the most credible path to achieving them. Under the current U.S. G20 presidency and the U.K. presidency to follow, there is an opportunity to put those benefits at the center of the FSB’s work, including through mutual recognition of well-regulated stablecoin issuers based on shared core principles. Managing risks and unlocking benefits should be part of the same agenda. The G20 should advance both.

Emerging markets hold more than two-thirds of global stablecoin supply—a powerful signal of demand and a major policy opportunity. Yet many policymakers and central bankers still focus primarily on the risks of dollarization, capital flight, and illicit finance, rather than the transformative potential of stablecoins. A new Coinbase Institute paper makes the case that these risks can be addressed through sound policy, while unlocking enormous benefits: cheaper remittances, near-instant micropayments, more efficient settlement, and new opportunities for tokenized markets and commerce. The answer isn’t to replace domestic payment systems like India’s UPI or Brazil’s PIX, but to build on them - connecting local payment rails to global stablecoin networks, including through well-regulated local-currency stablecoins. The policy choice is clear: establish sensible rules that manage legitimate risks while allowing innovation to flourish. Prohibition won’t keep stablecoins out. It will simply push activity offshore and out of sight. Read the paper:

CLARITY would have given the @CFTC new funding mechanisms and expedited hiring authority. Some of the same people raising concerns about staffing today opposed the legislation that would have helped address it. @ChairmanSelig is moving forward. Congress should help him build the agency he needs, not just commission another report.

The internet’s business model was built around people: attention, ads, subscriptions and checkout. AI agents are changing that. They can retrieve and use content without sending a human reader back to the publisher. That raises a real question for creators, publishers and developers: how can they get paid when an agent uses their work, sometimes for a fraction of a cent? Our new Coinbase Institute @CoinbaseCBI paper, "Machine-to-machine payments in the AiFi era," examines why existing payment rails often struggle with high-velocity microtransactions—and why stablecoins on low-cost networks are a strong fit today. The policy goal should be an open, interoperable payment layer, with safeguards that match the risks—not closed marketplaces that decide who can participate.

There was a bigger story behind the battle over stablecoin rewards in the CLARITY Act: a fight over who will control the underlying infrastructure of digital finance as tokenization moves rapidly from experiment to broad adoption. Tokenization is forcing a battle over whether this new financial system will be built primarily on private networks controlled by financial institutions, with central banks and regulators at the center, or on public networks, similar to the internet, that no financial institution owns and that anyone can build on. Many people don’t realize how systematic this battle between old and new has been, or how long it has been underway. As far back as 2021, the @baselcommittee effectively required banks to hold capital equal to 100% of their exposure to cryptoassets like BTC. That rule wasn’t designed to benefit banks - banks and their regulators frequently have competing interests - but its effect was to create a regulatory wall between the banking system and assets operating on open networks. Then, in 2024, the @BIS_org joined with seven central banks and dozens of the world’s largest banks and other financial institutions in Project Agorá to build an alternative tokenized payments system around commercial bank deposits and central bank money - essentially recreating the existing banking architecture on new technology rather than moving payments onto open networks. The common thread isn’t that banks and their regulators always agree. They don’t. And banks themselves increasingly experiment with public networks. But the core economics of banking - and the regulatory perimeter within which those economics operate - remain rooted in an institutionally controlled system. Banks and their regulators may have different interests within that system, but both have powerful reasons to resist financial activity migrating outside it to public networks that no institution controls. The stablecoin rewards fight was another chapter in this larger battle. Big banks sought restrictions on rewards that would make stablecoins less attractive as an alternative payments infrastructure. They activated community banks with warnings that rewards would cause massive deposit flight, despite never producing evidence for that claim. But the banking campaign was much bigger than rewards. The banks worked to peel away support for CLARITY among lawmakers in both parties, contributing to delays and ultimately the death of legislation that would have provided statutory protection for developers and decentralized financial applications operating outside bank-controlled payment rails. The Trump administration has embraced a very different approach to tokenization, competition and disruptive technologies. From its first days, the Trump Administration made it explicit U.S. policy to protect Americans’ ability to use open public blockchain networks, develop and deploy software, transact peer-to-peer and maintain self-custody - and to support innovation on permissionless blockchains. The President’s Digital Assets Working Group went further, calling on policymakers to embrace DeFi and describing the movement behind crypto as one dedicated to building a more open and efficient financial system. The administration has been putting that commitment into practice, using regulatory authority to enable more financial activity to move onchain and reducing regulatory barriers to the development of decentralized financial infrastructure. These regulatory steps don’t replace legislation. But the Trump administration deserves enormous credit for understanding what is ultimately at stake: not simply whether finance becomes tokenized, but what kind of financial architecture America will build. Finance will be tokenized. The question is what we tokenize onto: open infrastructure that anyone can build on, or a digital version of today’s system controlled by the institutions that dominate it. That is the fight.

The frictions and delays in the financial system create unnecessary costs that ultimately benefit only the intermediaries. Kudos to @ChairmanSelig for focusing on making our markets more efficient and resilient - and more accessible to the public.

The Trump admin is weighing a policy of promoting stablecoin adoption. All you have to do is look at bond yields to see why. The bank lobby is going to fight this because they fight every kind of progress that erodes their unjustified and underserved monopoly. When they do, it will reveal their true colors. A stablecoin is always (always!) easier to acquire than a bank account. It's also more functional. Once more assets go on chain, it will be more interoperable too. All else equal, there will always be more demand for stables abroad than dollar accounts. Banks arguing against such a policy are arguing for lower dollar demand, higher borrowing costs for the US government, higher mortgage rates, etc.

The underreported story of crypto’s growing political voice is its emergence as a major grassroots voting constituency. Nearly 70 million Americans own crypto. @standwithcrypto has more than 3 million U.S. advocates, who generated 1 million calls and emails to Senators in support of CLARITY. That wasn’t enough to overcome partisanship and powerful entrenched interests this time. But these advocates are voters—and the CLARITY vote gave them another reason to turnout in November.

The notion that an individual, non politician, “killed” Clarity with a tweet is patently absurd. For starters, if you believe this, you believe our entire political process is broken. You are also a sucker. Why? Because when @brian_armstrong tweeted “no bill is better than a bad bill,” ethics had not even been discussed. And ultimately the ethics clause and politics killed the bill. There was not path to success with the politicization of the bill.

All of us in the crypto community owe a massive debt of gratitude to @SenatorTimScott, @JohnBoozman, @SenLummis and @berniemoreno for the extraordinary work they put into CLARITY. They spent countless hours working through extraordinarily difficult issues, listening to stakeholders and colleagues across the aisle, and pushing relentlessly for clear rules that protect consumers while keeping innovation and the future of finance in America. The vote this week was disappointing. But their work was not wasted. They moved the debate enormously and laid the groundwork for the durable market structure the United States still needs. Big thanks to each of them for their leadership, persistence and commitment to getting this right.

This is not a race to announce the most pilots or write the most permissive rules. It is a long-term competition to build markets that are trusted, open and interoperable, and protections that can travel with assets across networks and borders. It's gratifying to see the regulators stepping up this week to ensure that the U.S. leads.

The @SECGov's Innovation Exemption creates a path for tokenized securities to trade onchain in the United States - a big step towards more modern, accessible, and competitive markets. @coinbase already supports tokenization for non-U.S. customers from Abu Dhabi. It is good to see a path emerging to bring these capabilities onshore. Huge thanks to @SECPaulSAtkins for advancing regulatory clarity in a way that supports innovation, investor choice, and the strength of American capital markets.