Senate committee advances stablecoin bill

The Senate Banking Committee voted March 13 to advance a bill regulating stablecoins, clearing the first hurdle for the bill to become law.

The bill — sponsored by Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Sens. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. — establishes a series of guidelines for issuers of stablecoins, which are digital assets that tie their value to that of another asset, such as the dollar. The bill is known as the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act of 2025, or GENIUS Act of 2025.

Senators voted to advance the bill in an 18-6 vote, with all Republican members and five Democrats voting yes.

“The GENIUS Act establishes common-sense rules that require stablecoin issuers to maintain reserves backed one-to-one, comply with anti-money laundering laws and ultimately protect American consumers while promoting the U.S. dollar’s strength in the global economy,” Scott said in an opening statement at the bill’s markup.

The bill also stipulates that for issuers of more than $10 billion of stablecoins, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory framework for depository institutions and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s framework for nonbank issuers will apply, according to a March 10 news release from the committee.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the committee’s ranking member, said in her opening statement that the bill “ignores basic consumer protections” and “lacks basic national security protections,” among other things.

At the markup, Warren offered several amendments to the bill, though her amendments and those of some other Democrats were not adopted, as Republicans voted against them.

The Republican sponsors of the bill repeatedly said the GENIUS Act does have important consumer protections, sometimes contending that the amendments offered were outside the scope of the bill.

“We're going from this bill to market structure. We decided to talk about this in a narrow manner, and a number of the things that have been raised will be addressed, but they need to be addressed in market structure,” Lummis said, referencing a different bill, known as the market structure bill, that Republicans want to pass on digital assets more broadly.

In May, the House passed a bill, known as the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, that would give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission new oversight of the digital commodities market while maintaining the SEC’s oversight of the digital securities market. The legislation never passed the Senate and would need to be reintroduced in this Congress.

Lummis said in February that Congress is likely tackling stablecoin legislation before market structure, but she thinks “both get across the finish line this year.”