Coinbase, Ripple, a16z Push Senate on Crypto Market Structure Bill

The biggest names in crypto want the Senate to stop stalling on the crypto market structure bill. On Thursday, a coalition led by the Crypto Council for Innovation and the Blockchain Association sent a letter to Senate Banking Committee leadership arguing that Washington is running out of time to set the rules before builders give up and leave. Signatories include Coinbase, Circle, Kraken, Uniswap Labs, Ripple, Andreessen Horowitz, Chainlink Labs, Chainalysis, OKX, Paradigm and Block. It is, effectively, the entire US crypto establishment signing the same document.

Who Sent the Letter and What It Actually Asks For

The April 23 letter landed on four desks: Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-SC), Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Ranking Member Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). Two of those four have been openly hostile to the industry in past hearings. The coalition sent it to all four anyway.

The ask is narrower than the signature list suggests. The groups want Congress to finalize the crypto market structure bill now sitting in committee, draw a clean line between SEC and CFTC oversight, carve out protections for developers who write code for decentralized systems, and lock in one federal rulebook instead of the fifty-state patchwork that currently exists.

They also backed the committee's work on stablecoin-linked consumer rewards, the feature that banks have been fighting hardest against. That detail matters. It tells you the coalition is not just demanding rules, it is picking a side in the ongoing fight between crypto firms and traditional lenders over who gets to pay yield on a dollar-denominated token.

With thoughtful market structure legislation, Congress has the opportunity to extend that leadership into the next generation of financial technology.

Why This Letter, Why Now?

The timing is not random. An April target for Senate action has already slipped, and every week the bill sits in committee is a week that founders, VCs and developers keep looking at Dubai, Singapore and London instead of Austin or Miami. The letter is blunt about that risk.

The Crypto Council for Innovation and Blockchain Association organized the sign-on to prove the industry is not fragmented on this point. When Coinbase, Ripple and a16z agree on the same three paragraphs of legislative demands, that is the signal. These firms fight each other in court, in token listings and in product categories. They do not share letterhead casually.

There is also a political read here. Republicans control the Banking Committee, but the bill needs Democratic votes to clear the Senate. Naming Warren and Gallego as co-recipients, and explicitly framing the request as bipartisan market structure rather than industry giveaway, is the coalition's way of building cover for Democrats willing to cross the aisle.

The 'Regulation by Enforcement' Problem

Read the sharpest line in the letter carefully. The groups argue that agency guidance is not enough, and that the country cannot slide back into the Gensler-era playbook of enforcement actions standing in for clear rules. That era cost Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken and Uniswap Labs tens of millions in legal fees and years of strategic paralysis.

Even with a friendlier SEC in 2026, the coalition does not want to bet the next decade on the vibes of whoever runs the agency. They want statute. They want words in a law that survive an administration change. That is the entire thesis of market structure legislation in one sentence.

The United States cannot risk a return to the previous era of regulation by enforcement, which perpetuated uncertainty for both builders and market participants.

Moreno Says End of May. Should You Believe Him?

Senator Bernie Moreno offered a concrete deadline Wednesday evening at a Washington event. He told the room he believes crypto market structure legislation will be finished by the end of May, according to journalist Eleanor Terrett, who covered the remarks. That would put a final bill on the Senate floor in roughly five weeks.

Moreno also dismissed the bank lobby's complaints about stablecoin yield as, in his words, a lot of noise in the system. His office did not confirm whether the committee markup could slip into next month. Translation: the deadline is aspirational, not scheduled.

There is some supporting evidence for the optimism. The Block reported this week that negotiations around the Senate's crypto package had reached what one source called a good spot on the stablecoin rewards question specifically. That suggests the most politically charged piece of the bill is closer to settled than it was two weeks ago.

The caveat is that TD Cowen's policy desk has flagged five separate hurdles still hanging over the legislation beyond the yield fight. Those include definitional fights over what counts as a digital commodity, jurisdictional boundaries between the SEC and CFTC, treatment of DeFi protocols, custody rules for institutional holders, and secondary market trading oversight. Any one of those can tank a markup.

What It Means for Builders, Traders and Tokens

If the bill passes in anything close to its current form, the immediate winners are the firms that signed the letter. Exchanges get jurisdictional clarity. Stablecoin issuers get a federal framework instead of state-by-state money transmitter licenses. Developers get a statutory safe harbor that does not depend on SEC discretion.

The losers are less obvious. Banks lose the fight to block yield-bearing stablecoins. State regulators lose the leverage they have been accumulating over crypto firms. And any project relying on regulatory ambiguity to operate, which is more projects than the industry likes to admit, suddenly faces real rules.

For token holders watching from the outside, the read is simpler. Clear rules historically correlate with institutional inflows. If May delivers what Moreno is promising, the backdrop for major-cap crypto assets in the second half of 2026 looks very different from the first half. If May delivers another delay, it is more of the same grinding uncertainty.

The coalition's closing argument is that timely action is critical. Strip away the lobbying polish and what they are really saying is: we have been patient, we have done the work, and we are tired of watching the next generation of crypto companies incorporate in Zurich.

The Cynical Read

Here is the part the press release version of this story leaves out. An industry coalition sending a public letter is what you do when the private meetings are not working. Coinbase has lobbyists on the Hill every week. a16z has a full-time policy shop in DC. Ripple has spent years and tens of millions cultivating relationships in both parties. If those private channels were delivering, there would be no letter.

The letter is pressure. It is the industry telling Scott, Warren, Lummis and Gallego that the next delay will be blamed on them by name, in a document with thirty signatures, that reporters will quote for the next six months. That is not a complaint about policy. That is a countdown clock.