Many US Senate Democrats are still showing that they are ready to approve a crypto market structure bill, this effort has legs, they expressed in a meeting with several crypto CEOs on Wednesday, which focused on the way forward on US crypto regulation.
Digital asset business leaders scheduled two meetings on the same day, with the first meeting to discuss next steps with Democrats, whose votes would be needed to lift any bill over the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. The second meeting was with Republican counterparts of those lawmakers, who are pushing a draft bill that is their response to the House of Representatives’ Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.
“It is clear that there is a substantial level of Democratic support,” Chainlink CEO and co-founder Sergei Nazarov said in a statement to CoinDesk between the meetings. He said more than 10 MPs attended, “all committed to devoting their time and efforts to making the bill a success.”
Tensions are rising between the parties and within crypto circles as the Senate bandwidth looms for 2025. When some Democratic legislative proposals on decentralized finance (DeFi) leaked recently, many in the industry considered the ideas a fatal blow to market structure negotiations. Some of them made those views public.
There was some strong language spoken by Democrats at the meeting on that tension, but the policy flaws probably aren’t worth fixing, participants said.
“I think the friction is temporary and will be resolved soon,” Nazarov said.
Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, told CoinDesk in an interview that the meetings “reopened the conversation,” but she added that “we have our work cut out for us” when it comes to raising the knowledge level of lawmakers to the level that needs to be written.
The meeting between industry leaders and Democratic lawmakers was said to be led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who has been advocating for tailored crypto regulations for years. Nazarov said Democrats have shown high interest in addressing illicit finance concerns in the legislation.
Following the Republican meeting, a spokesperson for Senator Tim Scott, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, released a statement that Scott “calls on Democratic colleagues to immediately return to the negotiating table, engage in serious bipartisan discussion, and provide concrete responses to our bill.”
With both parties and the industry coming back to the table this week, crypto leaders are hoping to get that process started. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who was set to attend both meetings, took to the social media site ahead of the meetings.
After the first meeting, he posted again that the industry is “pressing in DC” to pass a bill, and he also flagged a Stand With Crypto effort to gather support for it.
However, several obstacles remain in that process. The Senate Banking and Agriculture committees need to advance the language in the overall Senate, and the former is the only committee that has produced a draft so far. And if the Senate approves a final bill, it would have to return to the House for a vote before going to Trump for his signature.
Crypto votes in Congress have been a bright spot in US policy work, with huge, bipartisan results for the recent bill to regulate stablecoin issuers and the House Clarity Act. But the law will have to be abolished before winning votes.
“The passage of the bill is really beneficial for everyone – getting the digital asset community accepted by the US government,” Nazarov said.
While the bill is a priority goal, Smith said failing to do so this year will not spell disaster.
“All is not lost if we don’t get this done in the short term,” he said, citing policy work being done at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Both agencies are pushing ahead with crypto policy writing and are not waiting for new authorizations from Congress. “We’re seeing real progress and real clarity that I think is ultimately going to be permanent.”
UPDATE (October 22, 2025, 20:12 UTC): Adds comment from the office of Senator Tim Scott.
UPDATE (October 22, 2025, 21:06 UTC): Adds comments from Kristin Smith Solana Policy Institute,