House crypto tax bill reaches institutions, then hits the calendar

The House Ways and Means Committee published a 114-page crypto tax bill late Monday ahead of a Wednesday markup, and CoinDesk frames the 10 a.m. ET vote as potentially the first significant movement for crypto tax legislation in Congress, though the same report notes the bill is unlikely to become law this year.

The Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act takes up de minimis transactions, gain and loss accounting, transfers, wash sale rules, mining, staking and broker requirements, building on versions Representatives Steven Horsford and Max Miller introduced over the past year. Much of the text addresses tokenized assets, with a separate section on how ownership is treated when a digital asset is disposed of, and it directs the Treasury secretary and the IRS to develop and publish rules as needed.

The provision the industry has asked loudest for is also the narrowest. Taxes on network or transaction fees would go to zero below $10, but anyone who made more than 5,000 transfers in the prior year is excluded from that relief. Even small-dollar token transactions currently require reporting a capital gain or loss, which is why advocates have argued the change would make digital assets usable for small purchases; the 5,000-transfer line reads as an answer to the obvious counterargument: a payments-scale exemption would also exempt trading-scale volume.

For all the retail framing, the provisions with the most consequence for institutions are the accounting ones: wash sale treatment, gain and loss accounting, broker reporting, and how staking rewards and mining income are characterized. A fund or advisor deciding whether to book a token position needs those answers before the position, not after, and today they arrive case by case through guidance rather than statute. A drafted definition, even one that dies in this Congress, becomes the reference Treasury and the IRS would write against — and it sits in part of the rulebook the SEC says only Congress can write, as this publication has argued.

The calendar argues against enactment: the House is set to break later this week until after the November election, leaving little floor time for a tax bill, and when members return the chamber may be occupied by the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, assuming the Senate can pass it. The Senate is scheduled to hold its first vote Tuesday and needs 60 members to continue, and Democrats have raised concerns about a revised ethics provision in text shared Sunday.

The markup itself is the bill's durable output: a 114-page draft that fails a floor vote still becomes the baseline a later Congress starts from and the pressure behind the rulemaking it asks Treasury to undertake, and the gap between a text like this and an enacted one is precisely the window in which tokenized products are shipping. The CoinDesk dispatch carrying the bill also noted tokenized equities leading real-world-asset inflows: Binance's bStocks at roughly $118.5 million two months in and about 90% of on-chain equity DEX volume. Those positions get booked under rules Congress has not written yet.

Watch whether the $10 de minimis line and its 5,000-transfer carve-out survive Wednesday's markup intact. That single threshold says more than any floor vote about who this bill is drafted for.