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On Thursday, just as crypto markets were crashing to their lowest levels since 2024, I sat down with Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno—a former crypto entrepreneur himself—to discuss the future of the industry. Congress, of course, has been struggling for years to get its head around digital currencies, let alone figure out how to regulate them. In the meantime, crypto has matured into a multitrillion-dollar industry that’s been increasingly integrated into traditional banking and financial vehicles, even as some corners of the industry continue to exist in a sort of grey market.

Moreno has been trying to change that. Building on last summer’s bipartisan Genius Act, which created a regulatory framework for so-called stablecoins—digital tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar—Moreno has been pushing legislation that includes the Clarity Act, which would treat crypto as a commodity rather than a security. (The crypto industry has been advocating for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to have a greater role in oversight, in part because they think it would be a more lenient regulator than the S.E.C.) But the industry remains controversial in Washington: Lawmakers, alongside leading figures on Wall Street, are divided over whether to allow interest on stablecoins, or whether to ban credit card–style rewards on crypto accounts. The very pro-crypto Trump administration has so far failed to resolve the impasse.

The Clarity Act, in particular, would ostensibly resolve a number of outstanding regulatory questions about crypto, providing a market structure that would move digital currencies into the mainstream of finance. But momentum has been impeded, in part, by Democrats’ growing discomfort with some of the ethical issues surrounding the industry. To wit: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that just before Trump’s inauguration, a top United Arab Emirates official bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company. Indeed, according to The New York Times, the Trumps have made nearly $1 billion from crypto since his return to office. The Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank, puts that number at $1.5 billion.

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Science fuels farmers ability to grow healthy, abundant food for Americans. That’s why companies like Bayer depend on rigorous, predictable, science-based standards to bring new tools to market for farmers. Innovation isn’t a buzzword, it’s the lifeline that gives growers more options and keeps America’s food supply secure. 

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And then there is the extreme volatility of crypto itself. The value of Bitcoin has plummeted in recent months—down 50 percent since its high in October, leading analysts to suggest that the pro-Trump crypto bump has fully subsided. “It’s crashing because investors are switching into ‘risk-off mode,’ buying gold and safer equities,” my partner Bill Cohan, a former Wall Street banker, told me. “Bitcoin is purely a way to speculate, and only goes up if there is a greater fool who comes along and buys it. At the moment, the buyers are in retreat. Who knows when, or if, they’ll be back.”

But Moreno is undaunted. During our Puck Power Breakfast conversation, the first in a series hosted by Solana Policy Institute, the senator explained why he’s so bullish on digital currencies, his strategy for legislating, and why he’s hopeful that his stalled market structure bill will soon bring order to a still wild industry. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: You’re a member of the Senate Banking Committee, which is embroiled in negotiations over this market structure bill. The Senate’s version of the Clarity Act was supposed to be marked up last month, but stalled over the issue of third-party yields for issuers of stablecoin. Where do the negotiations stand right now?

Bernie Moreno: They’re extraordinarily frustrating, because we passed the Genius Act. If we pass a bill in August that does X—whatever X is—we can’t come back in January and say, Well, we’ve got to rethink it because we don’t like what we just did. That’s what’s happening, and it’s just super bad public policy. My colleagues voted for that bill, and even put out a press release being proud that they voted for the bill, and now they’re saying there’s something fundamentally wrong with it. Stablecoin is an interesting technology, it’s great, and it’s going to do a lot of really cool things. But 90 percent of crypto is really [covered by] this market structure bill, and we should be focused on that. Yet here we are.

There was a White House meeting the other day, trying to get the banks and the crypto industry closer to agreement on whether stablecoin issuers should be allowed to pay yields or rewards to account holders. Was there any progress?

Honestly, it’s a multilayered problem: Number one, people are afraid of new technology, and that spans generations. Number two is that this has become personal: People are fighting just for the sake of fighting. The real issue is underlined by false flags. The idea that banks are saying there’s going to be $6 trillion in deposit flight is totally insane. If banks are saying that stablecoins will cause deposit flights, wait until they hear about Treasuries, wait until they hear about stocks, wait until they hear about bonds. When you take money out of your checking account to pay a bill, is that deposit flight? It’s just a totally nonsensical argument. I need us to get past this so we can focus on getting market structure.

So how do you get past this? The banks are adamantly opposed, and they have advocates and allies on the Hill. Is there a space for some sort of compromise, or do banks need to drop the issue and get over it?

I think, ultimately, cooler heads will prevail. If all of a sudden, magically, we pass market structure, and every American pulls every cent out of their bank accounts and buys stablecoins, then we have mechanisms to react to something like that. But we just need to move on. I think the banks don’t want the crypto industry to be legitimized. That’s the fundamental issue, so they’re using fake excuses.

But the night before the markup, Coinbase was the one that said the Clarity bill is unacceptable. Should it have supported the status of the bill as it was going to be marked up?

The market structure bill does have issues. Title I is problematic, which is basically saying that all these issuers have to go first to the S.E.C., and the S.E.C. has complete and total jurisdiction. What problem does that solve? The whole reason to do market structure is so you don’t have a Gary Gensler 2.0 who basically decides, I’m just going to crush the industry. So that has to be resolved, but we’ll get it resolved.

Another issue also appears to be the ethics component.

That’s not really true. The issue is that Democrats want to rewrite the Constitution, and they want to make a political accusation against the president and vice president. We in Congress cannot write rules that override the Constitution. The Emoluments Clause is what regulates the ethics of the president of the United States. Congress has no business doing that.

But The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Trump family signed a deal with an Emirati prince, who took a half-billion-dollar stake in their crypto company, just days before the inauguration. Is that okay?

Are you asking whether it’s okay for the children of the president of the United States to be involved in business? That has nothing to do with what the president is doing. By the way, those investments aren’t necessarily guaranteed returns either. It’s all a distraction, and this is all said by people who should look in the mirror before they make these kinds of accusations. One thing has nothing to do with the other. Digital currencies are going to be the enabler of a future financial system that has dramatically less friction than what we have today. We accept the current financial system as this incredibly cumbersome system that relies on third parties to allow us to send and receive money; this is the future of the financial system. It will be built somewhere. Do we want it to be built in America or not? That’s the only question at play here.

There was an attempt last Congress, before you got here, to impeach President Biden because of Hunter Biden’s business dealings after Joe Biden left the White House. Should this just be a nonissue moving forward, so families can do business deals and make a lot of money on the family name?

You’re talking apples and oranges. Because you talk about Eric and Don Jr., who are incredibly smart, intelligent businesspeople, and Hunter, who is a degenerate, and the idea that he’s even able to make minimum wage would be a lift. So for him to get the kind of money he was getting was a complete grift. The Middle East funds are involved in a lot of things. They’re involved in a million different kinds of businesses. So I think that’s a completely different analysis. We have laws on the books, and people will get distracted. The Emoluments Clause is crystal clear. If somebody wants to bring a case, then bring a case.

How does the Senate version of the Clarity Act come down on the issue of whether members of Congress can own crypto?

Can we own cash too, or no? Why are we discriminating against a class of stocks? What we should be doing is saying, You can’t trade stocks with inside information. But what would be the utility in saying members of Congress can’t own a stablecoin? Stablecoins are cash. It’s basically the same thing. Why would you say you can’t own Bitcoin, but you can own gold?

Where do you land on tax policy when it comes to crypto? How far away is Congress from figuring that out?

We’re decently far away. If we can’t get market structure done, I think most of the other things are D.O.A. We have to get market structure done, then we have to have a tax policy that reflects the speed and complexity of digital assets. And we don’t have that right now. Our job is to create an environment here in America where we’re heavily pro-innovation, with guardrails. This isn’t about regulation. In fact, it’s the opposite. If we don’t pass market structure, we also have no regulations at all, which makes these businesses not able to attract the kind of investment they need to give their investors certainty. These business models move much faster than traditional business models, and we have to recognize that.

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