US market structure hits snag; Quintenz hits back at Winklevii

The U.S. Senate’s plan to advance digital asset market structure legislation may have hit a snag, and President Trump’s nominee to run America’s primary crypto regulator is firing back at some prominent crypto bros’ drive-by insinuations.

Crypto supporters remain optimistic that the Senate’s digital asset market structure legislation (the Responsible Financial Innovation Act of 2025, or RFIA) will have a swift and smooth journey to President Trump’s desk by Thanksgiving, or at the very latest, by Christmas.

Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott (R-SC) has indicated he wants the RFIA marked up by September 30 to meet this timeline. However, a prominent GOP member of the committee is suggesting that those who expect the Senate to act with all due haste might yet find a lump of coal in their crypto Christmas stockings.

On September 10, Politico quoted Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) saying, “I don’t think we’re ready [to advance market structure legislation this month]. People that I talk to still have a lot of questions. I know I still have a lot of questions.” Referencing the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act that Congress approved and Trump signed into law this summer, Kennedy said that was “a baby step. [Market structure] is a full leap. And we’ve got to get it right.”

During a Banking Committee hearing in July, Kennedy expressed reservations about rushing to pass any legislation that had been crafted in large part by the sector it seeks to regulate. Kennedy recalled that, years ago, Congress had let the Silicon Valley tech giants “draft their own rules and, uh, frankly … what we got as a result looks like somebody knocked over a urine sample.”

Complicating matters is that the legislation aims to codify rules regarding how to split oversight of digital asset regulation between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). That means the bill will have to pass through the Banking and Agriculture committees, which are responsible for the SEC and CFTC, respectively.

The traditional banking sector has also expressed concerns about certain provisions in GENIUS that it hopes will be rectified via the market structure push. Specifically, the ability of digital asset exchanges and other platforms to offer stablecoin ‘rewards’ that banks fear could cause customers to withdraw their cash deposits en masse.

Crypto supporters in the House of Representatives had hoped the Senate would rubber-stamp the CLARITY Act market structure bill the House approved in July. While the RFIA incorporates a lot of CLARITY’s language, it adds new language that, if approved, will require the House to hold its own vote on the RFIA. And any RFIA amendments by the House will require the bill to be sent back to the Senate for re-approval. So, lots of moving parts.

Senate Democrats have offered their vision for how market structure legislation should be crafted, including long-sought curbs on President Trump and his family making bank off their crypto ventures. It remains to be seen whether this stance is serious or just more of the same type of performative objections Dems engage in before ultimately caving.

Speaking this week at a CoinDesk Policy & Regulation event in Washington, D.C., crypto advocate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said it was “important to have this lens of ethics. It’s something that really undermines the entire industry … It’s very important to me and I’d like to get the best ethics provision that’s possible.”

CFTC nominee pushes back on Winklevii criticism

The CFTC’s traditional five-member leadership is currently staffed by a single individual, acting chair Caroline Pham. Trump’s nominee for the permanent CFTC chair position is Brian Quintenz, who has been waiting for a Senate Ag Committee hearing for months now.

Quintenz’s nomination was undercut by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, founders of the Gemini exchange. Despite both brothers publicly celebrating his nomination when it was first announced, they later told the president that Quintenz was “not in line” with Trump’s goals and policies,. Ag Committee chair John Boozman (R-AR) said last week that the committee stood ready to approve Quintenz but wouldn’t proceed until the White House made its position clear.

Quintenz got a nod of support from some prominent crypto associations who pushed back on the Winklevii allegations, but it seems Quintenz is now ready to do some pushing of his own. On September 10, Quintenz tweeted screenshots of some private messages between himself and Tyler Winklevoss in late July that Quintenz believes explain why the Winklevii turned on him.

The conversation begins with Tyler sending Quintenz a June 13 letter from Gemini attorneys to the CFTC’s Office of the Inspector General. The letter addresses the CFTC’s 2022 action against Gemini for “making false or misleading statements” regarding their 2017 plans to launch a BTC-based exchange-traded fund (ETF). That action led to a $5 million settlement this January.

In the following messages, Tyler asks Quintenz to “take a look [at the letter] and let me know your thoughts.” Quintenz responds by asking why the issues expressed in the letter were never raised in court by Gemini’s attorneys. Tyler replies by saying “some of these issues couldn’t be brought up in court” and then accuses the CFTC of having “totally abused the deliberative process privilege” and engaging in “7 years of lawfare trophy hunting.”

Quintenz ‘commits’ to “having a fair and reasonable review of the matter” to determine if anyone “acted inappropriately.” But Quintenz also says these matters would need to wait until there was “a fully confirmed chair.”

Tyler later says he’s “disappointed and surprised that you haven’t seen, heard, or read about our complaint yet… I’d like to understand your thoughts on this and how you plan to align with President Trump and the Administration’s mandate to end the lawfare and make amends for it.” Quintenz’s subsequent replies attempted to mollify Tyler but Tyler didn’t respond.

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Debankers beware!

Meanwhile, the dismantling of the federal government’s crypto guardrails continues unabated. On September 8, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced that it was taking “actions to eliminate politicized or unlawful debanking in the federal banking system.”

The actions are intended to support Trump’s Executive Order 14331, which warned banks not to turf clients based on their ‘reputational risk.’ While numerous federal agencies have already rescinded previous guidance on the ‘reputational’ issue, OCC chief Jonathan Gould felt the need to state that his agency is “taking steps to end the weaponization of the financial system.”

Gould said the OCC would “root out” banking practices that “discriminate against customers on the basis of political or religious beliefs, or lawful business activities. If and when the OCC identifies such activity, it will take action to end it.”

For starters, the OCC has requested information from its “nine largest regulated institutions” regarding their debanking activities. The OCC has also invited the public to submit complaints that might help the OCC conduct its investigations.

Speaking at the CoinDesk event in D.C. this week, Gould said debanking is “a real phenomenon” that needs to be halted. Gould also stated that his office would reverse “anti-crypto licensing conditions” imposed by the OCC’s previous leadership.

Gould sought to reassure banks that the new sheriff in town didn’t object to them dipping their toes into the digital asset ecosystem. Gould said he views “a lot of what crypto represents, as well as using the technology and processes underlying it, as being inherent to financial intermediation services.”

Gould expressed that the OCC would “work much more closely with those who are interested in doing these activities, and we’re going to chart a path to ensure you can do it in a safe and sound manner. That is our obligation as supervisors and regulators when you’re engaged in legally permissible activities.”

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Et tu, Pute?

In September 2024, while Trump was courting the ‘crypto vote’ during his election campaign, he told a group of crypto supporters that “maybe we’ll pay off the [then] $35 trillion [of US government debt] in crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper’ $35 trillion crypto—we have no debt.’”

Most observers believed Trump was joking, or at least half-joking, but given his enthusiastic embrace—both personally and on behalf of America—of digital assets as a source of wealth, some are starting to think he was more serious about the debt fix than initially suspected.

Case in point: Anton Kobyakov, a longtime ‘special advisor’ to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, recently mused that America is “now trying to rewrite the rules of the gold and cryptocurrency markets.” Kobyakov said these two sectors “are essentially alternatives to the traditional global currency system” and America’s actions in this area are intended to “urgently address the declining trust in the dollar.”

Kobyakov said America “plans to solve its financial problems at the world’s expense, this time by pushing everyone into the crypto cloud. Over time, once part of the U.S. national debt is placed into stablecoins, Washington will devalue that debt.”

“Put simply: they have a $35 trillion currency debt [actually $37.4 trillion and rising]. They’ll move it into the crypto cloud, devalue it and start from scratch. That’s the reality for those who are so enthusiastic about crypto.”

Putting aside the amorphous concept of the ‘crypto cloud’ for a moment, it’s worth remembering that the stated rationale behind America’s stablecoin embrace is to support the dollar as the world’s reserve currency (and this plan seems to be working). Faith in the dollar would evaporate if there were any effort to offer America’s creditors a pennies-on-the-dollar compromise, so skip that.

The hypocrisy quotient of Kobyakov’s statements is high, as Russia itself is heavily involved in digital assets, particularly stablecoins, as they offer ways to evade the economic sanctions imposed on the country following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

USDT (Tether) is particularly popular as a means of settlement for Russia’s international oil sales, but homegrown stablecoin alternatives are now claiming a bigger slice of this pie, like A7A5, a ruble-denominated stablecoin launched in January by a group that includes a sanctioned Russian state-owned bank. By this summer, A7A5’s trading volume had surpassed $41 billion.

In July, Russian state media outlet TASS reported that Russian state-owned weapons maker Rostec was planning the launch of its own ruble-denominated stable called RUBx on the Tron network, along with a new payments platform called RT-Pay. Both reportedly have the blessing of Russia’s central bank.

Given recent history, we’d advise Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino to steer clear of any windows above ground level.

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