White House crypto adviser Witt says other Clarity Act hurdles being cleared

Patrick Witt told CoinDesk that a recent compromise on stablecoin yield should hold as the Senate tries to advance its crypto bill, even as bankers continue warnings.

What to know:

• Patrick Witt, the chief White House official in the trenches on advancing the Clarity Act, said that the negotiation has been trying to solve other concerns even as banks and crypto firms continued to hash out their stablecoin yield differences.
• If the current compromise in the Senate holds, the rest of the sticking points should be easier to clear, he told CoinDesk TV in an interview.

The White House's main crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said that work is still being done to lock in the compromise that he thinks will move the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act forward in the U.S. Senate, though he said several other points are also being worked out behind the scenes.

In an interview on CoinDesk TV Monday, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets suggested Monday that the common ground that key senators from both parties said they'd secured on stablecoin yield seems to be intact."We're hopeful that the compromise that has been reached will be durable and will hold," Witt said. "Solving that was a must-have before we could get onto the other outstanding issues," which he said he's now pivoted to, though some of the issues have already been resolved.

Apart from the question of yield on stablecoins, over which bankers had successfully convinced some in the Senate that their deposit base could be in peril, the Clarity Act had a number of other potential hangups. Among those have been the illicit financial protections in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, and a request from Democrats that senior government officials (most pointedly, President Donald Trump) be barred from profiting off of the crypto sector.

Though Witt wouldn't identify the topics that have been settled in the ongoing talks, he said that the negotiations "made considerable progress in the background" while the yield argument between banks and crypto firms got most of the attention.

"We're very close to closing them out," he said. "All of these issues felt intractable and unsolvable at one point in time. So the fact that we've been able to close out a lot of them gives me confidence that we can close out these other ones, too."

The Clarity Act would need a markup hearing in the Senate Banking Committee before it can be advanced toward a final Senate vote. It had been close to such a hearing at the beginning of the year, but the bank lobbyists raised objections to stablecoin yield that delayed the process.

Last week, White House economists issued a report that downplayed the threats the banking sector contended are posed by giving stablecoin holders a return that resembles interest from a bank account. On Monday, the American Bankers Association answered back, saying the White House argument was flawed. Witt said the view of bankers is wide-ranging, depending on how close they are to the technology.

"They're grappling with it," he said. "These are all important issues to their members.

And, you know, some of them are going to view stablecoins more positively. Some are going to be a little bit more threatened by them."

Read More: Trump’s crypto adviser rejects Jamie Dimon on treating yield-bearing stablecoins like banks

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