Week of January 5, 2026: DEF EOY Blogs; Senate Banking & Senate Ag Digital Asset Markups; New CFTC Chairman; House Introduces Draft Digital Asset Tax Legislation; DEF Files New Amicus Brief

DEF Publishes 2025 Crypto Policy Recap Blog and Executive Director Letter

On December 22, 2025, DEF published a 2025 end-of-year Crypto Policy Recap Blog, reflecting on a landmark year for crypto policy. DEF’s blog unpacks the biggest policy victories of 2025—from the passage of a historic stablecoin law to a meaningful shift in how policymakers think about DeFi and developer protections. It also explains the obstacles that remain for DeFi as we move into 2026. 

Read the full EOY Crypto Policy Recap Blog here.

DEF’s Executive Director and Chief Legal Officer, Amanda Tuminelli, published a 2025 end-of-year Executive Director Letter outlining predictions for 2026 and highlighting how DEF will show up for DeFi in the year ahead. Against an evolving landscape, DEF will have four key priorities in the new year: legislation, rulemaking, litigation preparedness, and education.

Read the full 2025 EOY Executive Director from DEF’s Amanda Tuminelli here.

Senate Banking and Agriculture Committee Schedule Markups of Digital Asset Market Structure Legislation

This week, it was reported that on January 15, 2025, the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Agriculture Committee will be holding Committee markups of draft digital asset market structure legislation. The bills reflect bipartisan collaboration among Senate offices and committee staff throughout 2025. Importantly, any legislation reported out of the Senate Banking Committee will ultimately need to be reconciled with the Senate Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. commodity markets.

For background, developer protections remain an essential part of the market structure legislation. DEF has consistently advocated for strong developer protections. In August 2025, DEF led a coalition letter signed by more than 115 organizations urging the Senate to include robust, nationwide protections for developers and non-custodial service providers in its market structure bill. Absent these protections, the coalition has made clear it cannot support the legislation.

The Senate Banking Committee’s Market Structure Bill

The most recent public draft of the Senate Banking Committee’s market structure bill, released in September 2025, included the most robust protections for software developers and self-custody our industry has seen to date. 

Title V of the bill, “Protecting Software Developers and Software Innovation,” incorporated the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) (Section 505) and the Keep Your Coins Act (Section 506). Notably, Section 501, “Protecting Software Developers,” clarified that software developers who create and provide non-custodial technological infrastructure are not subject to securities regulations designed for traditional financial institutions—reflecting a critical recognition of the structural differences between DeFi and traditional intermediaries. The draft also provided for federal preemption of these protections and amended criminal code Section 1960 to clarify that a person must have control over assets to be considered a money transmitting business operator, protecting software developers from being unfairly treated as money transmitters when all they do is publish code. 

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s Market Structure Bill 

In November 2025, the Senate Agriculture Committee released its own market structure discussion draft. This draft bill referenced the BRCA and included self-custody protections, but did not yet contain any developer protections. DEF is optimistic that the Ag Committee will include developer protections resembling Section 409 of the Clarity Act in its version of market structure. 

As the legislation moves forward to markup, DEF will continue to advocate for developers wherever possible and protect them from misclassification or inappropriate regulation. 

Mike Selig Becomes CFTC Chairman 

On December 22, 2025, Michael Selig was sworn in as the new Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) following Senate confirmation. As highlighted in a prior DeFi Debrief, Chairman Selig brings extensive regulatory experience in digital assets. The DEF team congratulates Chairman Selig on his appointment and looks forward to working with the CFTC to advance rules that recognize the reality of DeFi technology, protect software developers, and support self-custody. 

House Introduces Draft Digital Asset Tax Legislation

On December 20, 2025, House Ways & Means Committee members Reps. Max Miller (R-OH) and Steven Horsford (D-NV) released a bipartisan discussion draft of the Digital Asset Protection, Accountability, Regulation, Innovation, Taxation, and Yields (PARITY) Act. 

The legislation aims to eliminate excessive taxation on routine consumer transactions, address phantom income and valuation distortions, and protect consumers and the integrity of the tax system. The bill includes directionally positive provisions for digital assets, including de minimis tax relief for the sale or exchange of regulated payment stablecoins, trading safe harbors for digital assets, and an election regime for the taxation of digital asset mining and staking rewards, and more.

Any tax framework must be carefully designed to avoid impeding DeFi technology and instead account for its unique, noncustodial, and disintermediated structure—an approach recognized by Congress in the 2025 bipartisan supermajority passage of the IRS Broker Rule Congressional Review Act joint resolution. 

Notably, the draft bill contains several bracketed sections, accompanied by explanatory notes providing information on the general policy direction and intent for those areas. The current draft text is available here.

DEF Files Amicus Brief in USA v. Peraire-Bueno

On December 22, 2025, DEF filed an amicus brief in U.S. v. Peraire-Bueno to present support for the argument that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) novel theory of wire fraud violates defendants’ Due Process rights. In its amicus brief, DEF argues that due process “requires the government to impose new rules on novel technologies through lawmaking, not prosecutions.” Accordingly, we argue that the DOJ’s practice of regulating software developers through criminal indictments with unprecedented legal theories violates developers’ rights.

Read the full brief here.

DeFi Dictionary

We are kicking off 2026 with a “phrase of the week” that is at the heart of DeFi: Distributed Ledger Technology. 

Notable and Quotable 

“We can’t let fear of the future trap us in the past […] we need to adapt new rules to allow people to experiment, so those that want to try to move things onchain can […] When there are systems that don’t require intermediaries, we can’t make intermediaries speak them into existence, simply because American financial regulation has traditionally required or relied on regulated intermediaries there that are deputized with compliance and reporting obligations. …”

——Partner and General Counsel at Multicoin Capital, and Board of Directors at DeFi Education Foundation, Gregory Xethalis on the Crypto in America Podcast: “The Latest on Crypto Regulation, Tax Policy, ETFs & Future Policy”

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