Daines unveils ADAPT Act pairing stablecoin payment relief with wash-sale limits

Daines has unveiled the ADAPT Act, a crypto tax bill that pairs a stablecoin payment exemption with a loss-harvesting restriction. Qualifying stablecoin purchases and crypto-paid transaction costs of $10 or less would be exempt from gain-or-loss recognition, while the restriction arrives with no stated ceiling, leaving only the relief side capped.

That $10 cap points the exemption at small payments made in crypto rather than at holdings, and spares filers the arithmetic on amounts that cost more to report than they produce. How much of the market the relief actually covers turns on a word left open in the draft: what makes a stablecoin purchase "qualifying" is not defined. A narrow reading of that term would confine the carve-out to a sliver of payment activity.

On the other side sits the tightening—a wash-sale constraint on crypto losses that the draft describes only as a restriction on loss harvesting—with no revenue estimate attached, leaving open whether the restriction is sized to offset the exemption or merely travels with it. One provision carries a $10 ceiling; the other carries none.

The bill arrives on a separate track from the rest of crypto's federal rulebook, where the Senate's Clarity Act died at 49-50 and market-structure definitions have moved to the agencies. A two-member SEC is weighing a five-year tokenized-stock exemption, and the Fed and the OCC are writing stablecoin reward presumptions around a 48-hour redemption deadline—all agency moves reachable by FAQ or relief order. A tax exemption for stablecoin payments is not an agency move reachable by FAQ or relief order; it needs a statute, which means it needs the chamber that has already come up short on crypto legislation. As this publication has argued, every unpassed statute raises the price of statutory certainty, and a payments-only provision is the narrowest vehicle anyone has put forward for buying some.

The draft does not say which committee will take the bill up, when any provision would take effect, or whether the $10 figure would be indexed. All three matter less than the definition of a qualifying stablecoin purchase, the term that decides the exemption's reach, and no stated ceiling bounds the loss-harvesting restriction the same way.