In brief
- Senators, led by Cynthia Lummis, are racing to include a pro-crypto amendment in President Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill."
- The amendment could include tax exemptions on smaller crypto transactions, clarification on the taxation of crypto staking rewards, and a measure to encourage companies' reporting of unrealized crypto gains.
- The push to include the amendment is a last-minute scramble that could turn out many different ways, but will likely be decided by Monday's end, sources said.
As Senate Republicans race to pass President Donald Trump’s sweeping budget reconciliation bill, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a last ditch initiative is underway in the halls of Congress to tack on an amendment to the legislation that would benefit crypto investors in potentially numerous ways.
The buzziest of the bunch appears to be a provision that would, at last, apply a so-called de minimis exemption to capital gains taxes on small amounts of crypto, which could provide a pathway for greater adoption of cryptocurrency for payments.
At the moment, disposing of even small amounts of, say, Bitcoin to buy a burger, or a nominal amount of Ethereum to pay a gas fee on the network, requires users to calculate capital gains and losses on every transaction. Whether a change to these tax laws makes it to the final version of the Big Beautiful Bill, though, is still TBD.
The timing is down to the wire. As of Monday afternoon, legislators are currently debating several amendments to add to the bill. At the same time, Senate Republicans are meeting privately to determine whether to add all or part of a crypto tax provision to the bill that Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) has been working on for well over a year, sources familiar with the matter told Decrypt.
“It wasn’t clear it would be done in time for inclusion in the [Big Beautiful Bill],” one crypto policy leader familiar with the deliberations told Decrypt, speaking of Lummis’ crypto tax provision. “It finally got done, like, yesterday.”
Now, in real time, crypto policy leaders and their allies in the Senate are racing to determine what elements of the provision could reasonably be added to the Big Beautiful Bill this afternoon. Legislators involved want to get a win for crypto if they can, but not risk adding more chaos to a legislative process that has already been mired with Republican defections and controversy.
“This is a Hail Mary,” the crypto policy leader said of the amendment. “If it gets slotted in, it gets slotted in today.”
Rumors are currently flying around Washington, with crypto leaders guessing, mostly in the dark, what crypto provisions might make the cut. The decision will ultimately come down to Lummis, Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), sources said.
A staffer in Lummis’ office declined to elaborate to Decrypt about the current contents of the crypto amendment, but referred to an X post Lummis put out on the subject Monday afternoon.
“I am working on an OBBB amendment to ensure Americans can use digital assets without fear of tax violations,” Lummis said. “More to come soon!”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question from Decrypt about the president’s support for the quickly unfolding initiative.
Crypto policy leaders are most confident the amendment will include two elements unlikely to rock the boat in the Senate: a clarification on tax timing for crypto staking and mining rewards, and a mark-to-market accounting provision for companies that hold crypto on their balance sheets.
The staking measure would explicitly clarify that Americans who earn crypto rewards via staking or mining will only be taxed on those rewards once they are sold. In the last few years, legal disputes have arisen over whether staking rewards should be considered income that must be taxed at the moment of creation, regardless of whether the funds are sold or not.
The mark-to-market accounting provision would allow companies greater flexibility in reporting increases in value of stockpiled crypto, even when those gains are unrealized. In recent months, publicly traded companies have flocked to buy up cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana as a means of passively boosting their balance sheets.
A third provision that industry leaders think could possibly make the cut today, and get taken up for a vote as an amendment to the Big Beautiful Bill, is a de minimis tax exemption for crypto assets. Such an exemption would allow American crypto users to not report smaller crypto transactions as taxable for capital gains purposes. For example, if you were to buy a pizza with Bitcoin, the transaction would not be taxed the same way as if you sold off a large quantity of the cryptocurrency for a profit.
It’s unclear what threshold would be used if the de minimis exemption was added to the Big Beautiful Bill. It was originally $600, then was slashed to $200, and was recently hovering around $300, one crypto policy expert said.
“There have been so many different versions of this text,” they said. “It changes every week or so.”
While crypto industry leaders Decrypt spoke to Monday had slightly differing thoughts on the respective odds of different provisions making it into the Big Beautiful Bill, they all agreed in one regard: it’s either happening today, or it's not happening at all.