Senate Committee Advances Market Structure Bill With Custody Amendment Intact

The committee voted to advance the digital asset market structure bill after a markup that ran past midnight, leaving intact the segregation requirement that industry lobbyists had spent a year attempting to soften.

As written, the provision bars a registered intermediary from commingling customer assets with its own or pledging them as collateral without specific written consent. It is a direct legislative response to the failures of 2022, and its survival through markup is the clearest signal yet of where the chamber's consensus sits.

What was traded away

Two concessions cleared the path. The compliance runway was extended to twenty-four months, and a de minimis exemption now shields intermediaries below a threshold of customer assets from the full examination regime. Consumer groups called the second change a loophole; sponsors called it the price of a floor vote.

The bill still faces an uncertain calendar. Staff on both sides said floor time before the end of the session is possible but not assured, and a companion measure in the lower chamber differs materially on the treatment of decentralised protocols.