How the House Financial Services Committee is taking on tokenization: State of Crypto
Rep. French Hill, head of the House Financial Services Committee, weighed in on outstanding policy issues in an interview with CoinDesk last month.
Tokenization views
The narrative
After stablecoins and market structure, tokenization is the next major focus for the House Financial Services Committee, Chairman French Hill told CoinDesk last month.
Why it matters
The House Financial Services Committee is one of the few groups in Congress with direct oversight over federal regulators working on digital asset policy. It played a key role in advancing both the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act and the market structure-focused Clarity Act. Hill has run the committee since former Chairman Patrick McHenry retired from Congress.
Breaking it down
The House of Representatives found a way to get bipartisan agreement on stablecoin sales practices, decentralized finance and ethics rules before passing its version of the Clarity Act, Hill said.
“These are all things we dealt with in the House bill successfully and got 78 Democratic votes in the House last year,” he said. “So I don’t see any reason why they can’t find consensus in the Senate on the House bill.”
Hill spoke to CoinDesk at the Digital Assets and Emerging Tech Policy Summit hosted by Vanderbilt University and the Blockchain Association in early April about a range of issues his committee is examining.
He said the Senate counterpart to the House’s bill had begun adopting some of the House version’s details as lawmakers negotiated aspects of the legislation ahead of this month’s Senate Banking Committee markup.
“I think the Senate’s relied quite a bit on the House work on both FIT21 [the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act] from the previous Congress and Clarity in this Congress,” he said in April. “I think you see that quite clearly in the Senate Agriculture markup, I think you see that in the basic draft of many of the components in the Senate bill.”
Senate negotiators have kept their House counterparts “apprised of the process,” he said, adding that both he and Rep. Bryan Steil, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence, have been in touch with senators working on the Clarity Act.
