What We're Watching at Consensus 2026: Four Issues Defining the U.S. Crypto Policy Agenda

As the industry convenes in Miami for Consensus 2026, U.S. digital asset policy is at one of its most consequential moments to date.
The CLARITY Act has moved through the House and is now in the final stretch of Senate negotiations, while the GENIUS Act is being implemented through a coordinated set of agency rulemakings.
Tax issues that have lingered for years are showing real bipartisan momentum, while entirely new questions—about agentic finance, on-chain payments, and the future of decentralized infrastructure—are emerging.

As CCI heads to Miami, we are focused on four key issues:

1. Market Structure: The Window Is Open. Time to Land the Plane.

Without a comprehensive federal framework, the United States will continue to cede investment, talent, and innovation to jurisdictions that have already implemented clear rules. While the U.S. has historically led financial markets, today, the crypto market is growing faster offshore. 88% of 2025 CEX volume traded on non-U.S. exchanges; 75% of stablecoin volume flows through foreign-issued stablecoins; and only 19% of crypto developers are in the U.S., a 51% drop over the last decade

The CLARITY Act passed the U.S. House in July 2025 with strong bipartisan support and is now in front of the Senate. After months of negotiation, a workable compromise on stablecoin yield has emerged, and a Senate Banking Committee markup, which could occur as early as next week, is the next gate.

Industry alignment is strong. On April 23, CCI along with the Blockchain Association and a coalition of more than 120 companies and organizations urged the Senate Banking Committee to advance the markup. The path forward is evident: establish clear jurisdictional lines between the SEC and CFTC, provide durable protections for software developers and decentralized technology, ensure agency rulebooks work for tokenized financial instruments, and preserve consumer rewards tied to stablecoin payments.

LETTER: CCI, BA, and Broader Digital Asset Coalition Urge Senate Banking Committee to Advance Market Structure Markup
BRIEF: Why Digital Asset Market Structure Legislation Is Needed Now
POLICY MEMO: Why Digital Asset Market Structure Legislation is Needed Now

2. Tax Clarity: Unresolved, but Actionable

Tax policy is one of the clearest examples of an issue where the path forward does not require new theory—it requires applying existing principles to digital assets. A few of the key questions are dominating the conversation.

Staking: Two unresolved staking issues, the timing of taxation on rewards and the sourcing of staking income to validator location, are pushing critical infrastructure offshore. CCI’s recent explainer documents the impact: staking and validation infrastructure that secures billions of dollars in value now runs largely on offshore infrastructure. Institutional clients are contractually requiring U.S.-based providers to host validators outside the country to manage tax uncertainty. This is a direct competitive disadvantage for U.S. infrastructure, and it is fixable. On the issue of timing, Senator Todd Young and Rep. Mike Carey along with a group of 19 House Republicans have already urged the Treasury Department to revisit the relevant guidance—a position consistent with the administration’s own July 2025 recommendations.

De minimis: Requiring users to calculate capital gains on every small purchase or network fee is a structural barrier to adoption. A reasonable de minimis exemption is administrable, overdue, and consistent with how the tax code already treats other small transactions.

CCI supports not only excluding payment stablecoins as defined by Genius from income tax treatment, but also to exclude them from information reporting requirements. The two go hand in hand.

3. Payments and Stablecoins: The Framework Exists. Build on It.

The market signal for stablecoins is unmistakable. Stablecoin market capitalization sits at roughly $322 billion, up approximately 50% year-over-year. Serious institutional players are building real products: JPMorgan’s tokenized deposit work, Citi’s Token Services, HSBC’s tokenized deposit pilots, Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK, and SoFi’s unified fiat–crypto banking platform all point in the same direction.

The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established a comprehensive federal framework for payment stablecoins, representing a bipartisan commitment to advancing payment stablecoin adoption, strengthening the U.S. dollar, and modernizing payments. Implementation is now underway across a coordinated set of rulemakings: the OCC’s and FDIC’s proposed rules for issuers, Treasury’s principles for ensuring state regulatory regimes meet minimum federal standards, and a joint FinCEN/OFAC notice on AML and sanctions compliance. Comment periods are wrapping up, with key final rules due by July 18, 2026.

It is essential that regulators implement the GENIUS Act faithful to the text of the law and Congress’s intent to cement American leadership in digital payments while protecting consumers.

LETTER: CCI Letter on the OCC’s NPRM on GENIUS Implementation

4. The Future of Finance: Already Here

DeFi, on-chain finance, and agentic commerce have moved decisively from frontier to mainstream.

On-chain finance is past the proof-of-concept phase. Robust protocols and applications exist to deliver services across the full spectrum of finance including payments, trading, borrowing and lending, tokenization, and securing blockchain infrastructure. Across the top protocols (like Lido, Aave, Uniswap, and Morpho), tens of billions of dollars of total value is locked (TVL) in smart contracts.

McKinsey estimates that AI agents could mediate up to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Google, Circle, and others have launched agent-payment frameworks. Crypto is widely being recognized as a solution for the scale and speed required of these applications. Consensus 2026 features a dedicated track on agentic commerce—the first major industry conference to do so.

All of this innovation will require the advancement of policies that promote energy development, grid resilience, U.S. competitiveness, and national security.

Regulatory absence will not solve for these issues. We need functional regulation calibrated to risk; technology-neutral rules that accommodate non-custodial software and autonomous protocols; clear safe harbors for developers; and a forward look at machine-to-machine commerce, not just where the industry is today. As demand for energy grows alongside the expansion of digital asset mining, AI data centers, and other compute-intensive technologies, the need for a unified, credible voice advocating for smart energy policy has never been greater. Data centers alone already make up nearly 5% of U.S. electricity use, and this is expected to more than double in the next five years.

CCI is engaged in those forward-looking conversations now, including through CCI’s Proof of Stake Alliance, our recently announced acquisition of Digital Energy Council, partnership with the Decentralization Research Center, and our continued work with members on tokenization, DeFi, and on-chain finance.