Crypto's unglamorous tax bill reaches its first markup

The House Ways and Means Committee released a 114-page crypto tax bill late Monday and set a 10 a.m. ET markup for Wednesday, when members will debate and vote on whether to advance a measure whose unglamorous provisions — de minimis relief, gain and loss accounting, wash sale rules, and broker requirements — will decide whether institutions can hold digital assets at book scale. CoinDesk, which reported the text, notes that a favorable vote could mark the first significant movement for crypto tax legislation in Congress.

The bill is titled the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, and it follows earlier versions introduced over the past year by Representatives Steven Horsford and Max Miller, which makes Wednesday's markup less a debut than a consolidation of text already circulating on the Hill.

The provision that will draw the coverage is de minimis relief: the bill would eliminate taxes on network or transaction fees below $10, the small-dollar exemption the industry has requested for years on the argument that running a capital-gains calculation on a cup of coffee defeats the purpose of a payment token. Under current rules, a digital-asset transaction has to be reported no matter how trivial, and the relief carries a ceiling — anyone who engaged in more than 5,000 transfers in the prior year is excluded from it.

That ceiling is the most revealing line in the bill. Five thousand transfers is not a household number, and the exclusion reads as a deliberate refusal to extend a retail convenience to the desks whose volume would turn a $10 exemption into an expensive one. De minimis should mean small, not fast, and the drafting says so plainly. The test also looks backward, so a desk that crosses 5,000 transfers in one year sits outside the exemption the next, a sharper edge than the headline number suggests.

Less quotable and more consequential are the sections on gain and loss accounting, transfers, and wash sale rules; the questions of whether a position can be netted against another, whether moving an asset between wallets or entities is a taxable disposition, and whether a loss can be realized and the position rebuilt on the same terms decide whether a digital-asset book behaves like the rest of a portfolio or lives in a parallel reporting system with its own counsel. A separate section tries to clarify how ownership might be treated for digital asset dispositions, the same territory approached from the other end, while the reporting does not detail what the mining, staking, and broker sections would change.

The loud fight of the past two years has run through the Clarity Act's definitions and its ethics bar, which is why the Senate's calendar is consumed by market structure and the tax text arrived with comparatively little noise. The quiet bill is the one that decides whether the assets the loud bill legitimizes can be held at scale. A digital-asset allocation requires a listing rule and an accounting rule, and the second is on the docket this week.

The bill's odds are the blunt part: it is unlikely to become law this year, with the House breaking later this week until after the November election and leaving little time to debate and vote, and progress in 2026 would set up a continuation of the work in 2027 once the new Congress is sworn in. The chamber may instead spend the fall on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, assuming the Senate can pass it, an outcome the reporting calls far from certain. The Senate's first vote on the market-structure bill was scheduled for Tuesday and needs 60 senators to continue the debate, and Democrats have flagged concerns about a revised ethics provision shared Sunday, the subject of this publication's earlier reporting on where the Clarity Act's odds now sit.

Where the bill declines to choose, it delegates: the Treasury secretary and the IRS are directed to develop and publish new rules as needed, ordinary drafting practice and the way a measure that stalls in committee still shapes what follows, because the vocabulary a committee commits to paper tends to survive its vote count. Definitions written now would be inherited by the Congress sworn in in 2027 whether or not this text is.

Many of the bill's provisions address tokenized assets, and tokenized equities are leading real-world-asset inflows as the market recovers, with Binance's bStocks reaching about $118.5 million in two months, enough for the No. 2 issuer position and roughly 90% of on-chain equity DEX volume, according to CoinDesk. Wrappers are being issued faster than the tax treatment of the underlying disposition is being settled; the SEC delayed its tokenized-securities exemption in August, after pushback from the White House and SIFMA. As this publication has argued, the wrapper is the product until the underlying asset moves, and a wrapper the tax code has not placed is a wrapper whose economics are hard to compute.

The market-structure fight decides who may offer a token to American investors; the tax code decides whether the institutions those rules are meant to attract can carry one on their books, net a loss on it, and move it between custodians without a memo. Wednesday's markup is unlikely to produce a law. What it produces is a record: a committee vote and 114 pages of text the next Congress can pick up. Watch the margin rather than the tally. A tax bill that clears Ways and Means with Democratic votes in the week the House breaks until after the November election is a bill with a 2027 in it.