Market Structure Thaw as Stablecoin Fight Intensifies

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, January 27. And today, we are talking about what appears to potentially be progress on the market structure bill. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you wanna dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly/breakdownpod. Well, as Washington gets buried under what is for them a massive six inches of snow, opinions could be thawing on the market structure bill. Today was supposed to see the bill debated in the senate ag committee's markup hearing. However, that hearing has been postponed until Thursday due to the inclement weather. The Ag Committee is responsible for the parts of the bill that touch crypto commodities and the jurisdiction of the CFTC. This half of the bill is moving along a separate track to the banking committee bill, which was nixed by Coinbase the night before the hearing. When we left off with the ag committee, there seemed to be a growing divide between Democrats and Republicans on the issues. The hearing had already been postponed once in order to facilitate extra negotiations. But when the draft bill was released last week, it came without a Democrat endorsement, signaling that the hearing would be contested along party lines. In the following days, Democrats filed numerous amendments, including a measure to block the president from profiting from his family's crypto activities. Now it seems that tensions are simmering down and staff are working behind the scenes in an effort to pass a compromise bill. A Democrat aide speaking with the bloc said, when we returned, we were kinda taken off guard when in the January, they told us that they had changed their plans, had written a new draft without us, and were planning to mark it up that Thursday the fifteenth. The reporting framed the state of negotiations as Democrats seeking to bring Republicans to the table to work on bipartisan drafting. The aide added, we have a group of Democrats who are serious about getting a bill done in the committee, and we are all willing to get back to the table with chair Boosman's team to do that. A spokesperson for the ag committee framed the situation slightly differently. Their, on the record statement, said that there had been months of negotiations, adding, the legislation the committee will mark up on Thursday reflects much of what was discussed and negotiated during that time. There are some issues that the parties have disagreements about. At some point, you must move forward and vote. We have reached that point. The Democrat aide reinforced how intense the negotiations had been, but expressed a deep respect …