Crypto midterms: Solana Policy Institute says keep the Washington playbook

A day before the 3 November midterms, Colin McLaren of the Solana Policy Institute urged the crypto industry to keep the approach it has used in Washington since 2022. In an opinion column for CoinDesk he lists its parts: brief candidates from both parties, build trade groups, comment on bill text, and plan in decades rather than election cycles.

His crypto midterms case rests on votes the industry already won with Democratic help:

• 21 House Democrats voted to overturn SAB 121, the SEC accounting guidance for custodied crypto.
• 76 House Democrats backed repealing the IRS broker rule a year later. McLaren calls the repeal the first crypto-specific law in US history.
• 18 Senate Democrats helped carry the GENIUS stablecoin bill past the filibuster.
• Last month the House Ways and Means Committee reported a digital asset tax bill 38 to 5.

By our count, Democratic support in the House more than tripled between the first two votes.

“The industry realized it couldn't litigate its way to regulatory clarity.”

— Colin McLaren, Solana Policy Institute, in CoinDesk · coindesk.com

Where the playbook stalled

The column skips the Senate vote of 15 September. CLARITY failed cloture 49 to 50, and The Defiant counted no Democrat voting to proceed. The bill needs 60 votes, and we counted the missing votes last week.

McLaren also leaves out campaign money. Crypto super PAC Fairshake still had $108m unspent in late October.

What he expects after Tuesday

McLaren writes that markets and polls point to Democrats taking the House and possibly the Senate. He sees two pulls inside the party: moderates from newly won districts, some of which voted for Trump, and progressive voters in safe blue seats who want tighter rules. Moderates made up most of the bipartisan crypto supporters in the last two Congresses.

Neither party is likely to hold 60 Senate seats, so he expects no industry bill to pass and no hostile one either. The SEC and the CFTC will set crypto policy for the next two years. The SEC has issued Regulation Crypto and an innovation exemption, and the CFTC has proposed a structure for trading crypto on a regulated exchange.

The 2028 target

McLaren calls the 2028 presidential race the most consequential for crypto and says it starts the day after the midterms. He wants the industry to find Democratic champions and candidates for the SEC, the CFTC and the Treasury, and to keep the course of SEC chair Paul Atkins and CFTC chair Michael Selig under the next Republican administration. If you hold crypto in the US, his plan moves the fight over your rules from bills to appointments.

This is a summary of an opinion column. The Solana Policy Institute is an industry advocacy group.