Senate Democrats plan crypto roundtable as US government shutdown enters third week

The U.S. government is in its third week of shutdown, with a Senate vote to break the funding impasse scheduled for Monday night and another meeting Wednesday for lawmakers and crypto executives to discuss a long-stalled crypto market structure bill.

The Senate will vote for the 11th time to end the shutdown at 5:30 p.m. ET. Approval and the president’s signature would allow the federal government to resume operations, but failure would prolong the stalemate.

Despite the impasse, Congress remains active in other areas. On Wednesday, Senate Democrats will host a roundtable with crypto industry leaders including Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, and Ripple to discuss the proposed U.S. market structure bill, according to a post on X by journalist Eleanor Terret.

sauce: Eleanor Terret

The meeting, led by Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, was held after several Democratic senators introduced a counterproposal to the Cryptocurrency Market Structure Act, which critics say would “kill DeFi” and undermine bipartisan support for the CLARITY Act, which received the House of Representatives in July.

The U.S. Market Structure Act is the Senate’s counterpart to the House’s CLARITY Act, which aims to create a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets.

The U.S. government has been shut down since October 1, making it the third longest government shutdown in U.S. history after 1995 and 2018-2019.

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The ETF has a balance remaining.

What was supposed to be a pivotal month for U.S. crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has been stalled by the government shutdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is responsible for approving ETFs, is operating with limited staff and key deadlines have passed without renewal.

The first deadline to pass was October 2nd for Canary’s proposed Litecoin ETF. Bloomberg analyst Eric Balciunas said on Oct. 7 that the ETF and Canary’s HBAR ETF appear to have been finalized, but the shutdown will likely delay their launch.

sauce: Eric Balchunas

As reported by Cointelegraph, as many as 16 crypto exchange-traded funds are scheduled for October, including funds tracking Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Litecoin, and more. An additional 21 ETF applications were filed with the SEC in the first few days of October.

There are also several pending applications for Solana and Ethereum-based ETFs that include staking components.

Issuers such as Bitwise, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, CoinShares, Grayscale, Canary Capital, and VanEck have all updated their proposals to reflect the new staking provisions and filed amended S-1 filings with the SEC.

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