FIT21 Passed the House 279-136. The Senate Still Hasn't Voted.

The 119th Congress started work on January 3, and crypto's biggest legislative item is sitting exactly where the last one left it. FIT21, the market structure bill, cleared the House 279-136 on May 22, 2024. The Senate never voted. No markup, no floor slot, nothing.

That's the whole problem in one line. The House produced a framework for dividing digital asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC. The Senate produced silence.

The specification is as follows. FIT21 creates a registration path for digital commodity exchanges, defines the point at which a token stops being treated as an investment contract, and gives the CFTC spot market authority over non-security tokens. Those three pieces are the entire argument. Everything else is drafting.

Companies don't build against ambiguity. They build against rules, or they build somewhere else. Well over 100 crypto enforcement actions have landed since 2021, and each one is a data point pushing founders toward Singapore, Zug, or the UAE. You can argue about whether that's fair. You can't argue with the incorporation filings.

Here's my take, and it's not a popular one. Market structure doesn't pass this year. Stablecoins do. The Senate Banking Committee advanced a stablecoin bill in March on an 18-6 vote, and that's where the bipartisan math actually exists. Stablecoin legislation touches a payment rail that banks already understand and already want. Market structure touches every token, every exchange, every DeFi front end, and every one of those has a lobbyist with a different opinion about the definition of a digital commodity.

So Congress will do the easy half first. That's backwards. A payment rail without a token classification rule means the same asset can get called a security on Monday and a commodity on Tuesday, and the exchange listing it eats the legal bill either way.

Watch the Senate Banking Committee. If a market structure draft doesn't get a markup before the August recess, it isn't coming this Congress. The SEC will write the rules instead, one enforcement action at a time.