U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) is sticking to his guns that Congress can produce a stablecoin regulation law before he retires at the end of the year, despite a volatile political climate and the failure of the full U.S. House to vote on a bill his House Financial Services Committee passed previously.

"I think we can get our stablecoin policy set through and signed into law," McHenry said Tuesday at a Bitcoin Policy Institute event in Washington. "That will be the first sign that there is hope and that there is bipartisanship when it comes to this world of digital assets."

While individual U.S. senators have produced legislation that would address stablecoins – the tokens pegged to steady assets such as the dollar – the Senate Banking Committee hasn't yet taken any of it up. Both chambers would need to pass a bill that President Joe Biden would then be willing to sign.

McHenry has been negotiating stablecoin legislation with members of his party and House Democrats for months, and when a bill cleared his committee, it did so with the support of several Democrats. But there has been some resistance from the administration and from the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), about the role of the federal government in overseeing stablecoin issuers.

Lawmakers have long seen this corner of the crypto sector as the easiest to establish regulation over, but predictions of pending legislative success have often been stymied by the realities of a chaotic, closely divided Congress.

Regulations Congress Stablecoin Patrick McHenry

Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.