House Committee on Financial Services Chairman French Hill (AR-02) joined the Thinking Crypto podcast to preview the House’s upcoming “Crypto Week.” Next week, the full U.S. House of Representatives will vote on the CLARITY Act, the GENIUS Act, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act.
“Our market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, builds on FIT21, which we passed in the House in the last Congress. We’ll bring up the GENIUS Act, which is a dollar-backed payment stablecoin bill, originated in the Senate by my friend from Tennessee, Bill Hagerty, and a great bit of bipartisan work in the Senate. And then finally, Whip Tom Emmer’s bill is essentially an anti-CBDC bill. So, it’s going to be a big week next week. It’s been a week that lots of Members of Congress and Senators for years have worked on.”
On the CLARITY Act:
“This will be our best draft of a market structure bill that’s been debated in the House really, as you know, since 2023… This is a new version of market structure. We call it the CLARITY Act… We’ll vote on it in the House. It will go to the Senate and then we’re looking to Senator Scott, Senator Lummis, Senator Gillibrand, Senator Hagerty and others to put their views about market structure [out].”
On the power of payment stablecoins:
“I think that a dollar-backed payment stablecoin extends the brand of the dollar. It extends the power of the dollar as the reserve currency whether they’re stablecoin issuers here in the United States under U.S. law, or whether it’s a dollar-backed stablecoin issuer outside the U.S., that fundamental tenet is it’s going to be backed by short Treasuries.”
On Central Bank Digital Currencies:
“Americans have a million ways to do financial transactions, and they are very sensitive about their fourth amendment right to privacy.”
“The mission here is very simple. It takes an act of Congress to direct the executive branch and the Federal Reserve to design and implement something like a consumer-based central bank digital currency, and we’re reiterating that that’s the position of Congress.”
On what attracted Chairman Hill to crypto:
“It was actually the programmability of the blockchain operating system and writing applications there to remove costs, to make it easier to improve documentations, to reduce fraud, to drive cost out of a system of a traditional analog paper-based system. This allows us to replace those actual agency steps, producing certainly decentralized peer-to-peer activity, a better operating system, better documentation, less fraud, more clarity, more programmability.”
