Toomey Says Consensus Reached On Crypto Amendment

Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-PA), co-sponsor of the more popular cryptocurrency amendment to the infrastructure bill (supported by developers, Ted Cruz, and – oddly, Gene Simmons), announced on Monday that a bipartisan group of Senators has reached a compromise, and will request to pass the amendment via unanimous consent.

“I am delighted to announce we have reached a bipartisan agreement that includes Democrats, Republicans, members of the Senate and the Treasury Dept on a issue that had been vexing us for a while,” said Toomey, adding “We came together to provide greater clarity on who are the actual brokers of a cryptocurrency.We’re not proposing anything sweeping or anything radical.”

Toomey added that Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he won’t block the request.

“There’s still time to adopt this amdt before final passage of this (infrastructure) bill and I’ll be urging my colleagues to join in this bipartisan effort to fix this error,” said Toomey.

Toomey on revised cryptocurrency amdt: “I think it’s fair to say that none of us think this is an absolutely, perfect solution, but it is much better than the underlying text (of the bipartisan infrastructure bill).

— Craig Caplan (@CraigCaplan) August 9, 2021

Co-sponsor Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY) said “It’s been a long process with a lot of back and forth..The Senate has the opportunity to set the stage for successful implementation of digit assets into our financial system.”

More details via Jerry Brito, executive director of DC-based crypto think tank, Coin Center.

2/ It tightens the expanded definition of “broker” sufficiently that it would be difficult to argue it covers protocol devs who only write and publish code. pic.twitter.com/xv0vzyezDe

— Jerry Brito (@jerrybrito) August 9, 2021

3/ It then also has exemptions for validators and hardware/software wallet makers. pic.twitter.com/b8G3mjNSoM

— Jerry Brito (@jerrybrito) August 9, 2021

Oddly, Toomey and Lummis are both saying they’ll oppose the overall infrastructure deal ‘for unrelated reasons.’

Bitcoin remained strong on the news, much of which was undoubtedly baked in hours ago.