Sponsors (22)
The bill strengthens ethics, transparency, and consumer protections around digital assets held or influenced by high‑level officials—reducing corruption risks and regulatory uncertainty—at the cost of broader compliance obligations, privacy concerns, and potential dampening of innovation and private investment in the crypto sector.
Federal officials (President, Vice President, Members of Congress and other covered employees) are barred from using their positions to trade, promote, or otherwise profit from digital assets, reducing conflicts of interest and increasing public trust in government ethics and crypto markets.
The bill closes common loopholes by treating significant owners, controllers, and beneficiaries (including many nominee/trust arrangements) as subject to prohibitions and disclosure rules, improving transparency and enforcement against hidden or intermediary-driven transactions.
The legislation provides clearer definitions of 'digital asset' and explicitly covers yield-bearing products (staking, lending, DeFi) and derivatives, reducing regulatory uncertainty for market participants and extending consumer-protection coverage to emerging crypto products.
Broad, detailed definitions and coverage expand the number of products and actors subject to the rules, raising compliance costs for crypto firms and related businesses and creating incentives to limit or delay new products (chilling innovation and increasing costs for consumers).
Expanded beneficial‑ownership and nominee rules plus new disclosure requirements increase compliance burdens and legal risk for trusts, DA wallets, small organizations and family-held accounts, and could sweep in passive investors or ordinary transactions, raising privacy concerns.
Covered officials lose some personal investment opportunities in digital assets and face criminal penalties for violations, creating legal and reputational risk that could deter lawful activity or lead to contested prosecutions if rules are ambiguous.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Bars top federal officials and certain relatives from holding, controlling, issuing, promoting, receiving pay for, or trading digital assets (including indirect holdings) and applies criminal penalties.
Introduced May 21, 2025 by Maxine Waters · Last progress May 21, 2025
Prohibits the President, Vice President, Members of Congress, and specified close relatives from holding, controlling, issuing, promoting, receiving pay for, or trading digital assets while in office, including indirect holdings and uses of intermediaries. Defines digital assets broadly (stablecoins, memecoins, NFTs, DeFi products, derivatives tied to crypto, etc.), sets out anti-evasion and beneficial‑ownership rules, bars certain issuers from transacting on behalf of covered individuals, and makes violations subject to criminal penalties modeled on existing federal conflict‑of‑interest law.