CryptoLink - March 2025 Updates

Having confirmed all cabinet positions and secured funding through the rest of the fiscal year with a Continuing Resolution, Congress now turns its attention to executing the core of President Trump’s agenda through the budget reconciliation process. Currently, President Trump is supporting one “big, beautiful bill” with Republican priorities on energy, immigration and tax. To begin the process, both chambers must approve the same budget resolution. Republican leadership hopes to reach a compromise and vote on an updated budget in early April. Once they pass this critical step, a reconciliation bill will be drafted. The scope of tax extensions, the size of spending cuts, handling of the debt ceiling and the decision to use a current policy baseline to evaluate the cost of the bill are all still subject to debate. Meanwhile, stablecoin legislation has quickly jumped to the top of the agenda in the committees with jurisdiction over the issue. In the Senate Banking Committee, Chair Tim Scott (R-SC) has held a markup of Sen. Bill Hagerty’s (R-TN) Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoin Act (GENIUS; S.394), which passed by a vote of 18-6. In the House, Chair French Hill (R-AR) has introduced his own stablecoin legislation, the Stablecoin Transparency and Accountability for a Better Ledger Economy (STABLE) Act, which the Committee is expected to mark up this month. While the two bills overlap in a number of areas, key differences will need to be ironed out in conference if both bills pass their respective chambers. Importantly, Republicans see stablecoin legislation as low hanging fruit in the broader debate over digital assets. So far, Senate Democrats have been willing to work across the aisle on the issue; five Democratic senators joined the majority to help advance the GENIUS Act out of committee despite Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) opposition. It is yet to be seen whether House Financial Services Democrats will be eager to do the same for the STABLE Act, but notably, Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-CA) has already released a stablecoin bill of her own this Congress, which suggests bipartisan agreement is possible.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has continued the recent trend that started under President Trump’s leadership of ending and resolving prominent enforcement actions and litigation against digital asset firms, which is a radical change in approach to cryptocurrency enforcement. At the end of February 2025, the DeFi protocol developer, Uniswap Labs, announced that the SEC had informed the firm that the SEC had no further plans to pursue an enforcement action against the firm, which had received a Wells notice from the SEC in April 2024. Likewise, the SEC also closed its enforcement action against non-fungible tokens (NFT) marketplace, OpenSea, and cryptocurrency platform, Crypto.com, both of which had received a Wells notice from the SEC in August 2024. In March 2025, the SEC also filed a joint stipulation with Consensys Software Inc. to dismiss the case against Consensys with prejudice. In June 2024, the SEC had charged Consensys for unregistered offers and sales of securities and for operating as an unregistered broker. Last, at the end of March 2025, Ripple Labs announced that its litigation with the SEC may be coming to an end.  After nearly four years of ongoing litigation, both parties have reached an agreement to drop their appeals over the August 2024 judgment, in which Ripple was ordered to pay a $125 million penalty for improperly selling XRP tokens.