The U.S. Senate is scheduled to hold a markup on a major crypto market-structure bill on January 15, 2026, and that meeting is a real inflection point. If the committee can report a workable draft, negotiations move from talking points to actual legislative math; if it can’t, the timeline slips and uncertainty persists.
The fight isn’t about one detail—it’s about the shape of the system. Lawmakers are still split on DeFi compliance expectations, on whether “yield” around stablecoins should be constrained, and on what ethics guardrails should be hard-coded before the bill advances. Those choices will decide compliance cost, product design boundaries, and which regulator gets the steering wheel.
DeFi compliance is the pressure point
One of the sharpest divides is whether DeFi should carry heavyweight compliance duties. Democrats and some regulators are pushing for sanctions screening and KYC-style controls, arguing that DeFi can move hundreds of millions of dollars daily without mandated user identification. Industry groups counter that open-source code and developers shouldn’t be treated like financial intermediaries and want statutory protection against broad liability.
That creates a practical engineering and legal dilemma. If protocol teams are forced into “operator” obligations, they face hard questions about implementation, custody touchpoints, and on-chain privacy tradeoffs; if requirements are minimal, critics argue enforcement gaps will persist and illicit finance risk remains.
Ethics and jurisdiction will shape the final bill
Ethics language is now a major political lever inside the markup. Democrats are demanding provisions that prevent senior officials from profiting from crypto activities, citing reporting around former President Donald Trump and family-linked ventures as the reason this can’t be left vague. Whether those guardrails are included—and how aggressively they’re written—could decide how many votes the package can actually hold.
At the same time, the bill still hasn’t cleanly settled the SEC–CFTC boundary, especially for spot markets and stablecoin structures that resemble yield. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act has been discussed as a framework to clarify roles, and the recent confirmation of Mike Selig as CFTC chair has been cited as a factor that could tilt oversight toward the CFTC. Until those lines are explicit, firms will keep building compliance roadmaps under multiple, conflicting scenarios.
The January 15 session is the immediate signal check. The most actionable readout will be whether the committee reports a bill and which DeFi compliance measures and stablecoin yield constraints survive amendments. That outcome will directly influence custody design, onboarding friction, surveillance expectations, and the pace of institutional entry into tokenized assets and derivatives.