Now Bitcoin soaring above 120,000 points, first time since hitting record highs this year.
In New York morning trade, we are looking at the crypto major higher and holding above 12,500, and the crypto major cleared 121K yesterday and is up around 10% in just five days.
Earlier this week, the SEC and CFTC vowed to end their long running turf war and collaborate on.
Clarity and the Treasury won't tax unrealized crypto gains while senators backed a de minimis tax exemption at a finance hearing.
Joining me on this Friday morning to weigh in is Ron Hammond, head of policy and advocacy for Winnere.
Happy Friday, Ron.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Happy Friday.
It's been a little crazy, so looking forward to getting into all that and all the drama that is with cryptopolitics.
Yeah, and speaking of which, it is day 3 of the. shut down, but we have continued to hear a lot out of DC when it comes to crypto.
So first and foremost, the SEC CFTC gathering, the first roundtable in nearly 15 years.
What were the key takeaways?
First off is more coordination, and that is something that's been brand new for this industry.
You know, if you take back the Biden administration last year, we had the CFTC saying one position on Ethereum, for example, and we had the SC saying the complete opposite.
And so seeing that coordination and this. has been incredibly welcome, especially given that the two regulators are needed to get a market structure legislation passed through Congress, but also to give clear rules of the road to the industry.
So unfortunately shutdown, we're seeing a little pause of that, but we saw both the roundtable as well as several no action letters come out moments before the shutdown occurred from the SEC.
So we've seen a lot of positive movements.
Unfortunately, the shutdown, we're kind of in a holding pattern, but overall it's been really crazy to see how DC has done a 180 on crypto.
And what's to come because it's both in Congress and the regulators.
Yeah, and 2025 has been quite the year for crypto, hasn't it, especially with the incoming Trump administration.
Second term for Trump and a lot of crypto in the spotlight.
But of course when it comes to taxes, Americans care about taxes.
And with more Americans allocating capital to digital assets, what is your take on the future of taxation?
Well, tax is a huge issue with crypto.
I know for the longest time, most folks have probably heard the SEC or the CFTC is the main conversation in crypto in DC, but the IRS is a major, major player here and there's a lot of questions about the current tax rules when it comes to crypto.
It's classified property since 2014, according to the US government.
That comes with a bunch of other hurdles as well.
So things like like kind of exchange, that's something Congress is looking at market to market.
That's something that Congress is also looking at.
De minimis from the Treasury Department.
That's huge.
It's been something that the industry has been asking for for over 7 years.
So it looks like Congress is actually teeing up a big tax bill both in the House and the Senate.
Cynthia Leiss is leading the Senate version, and they're going to try to push forward for a tax bill of sorts into the next big tax package hopefully later in 2026.
So we'll see if crypto makes it into that big tax package, but overall tax and crypto is going to be.
Big issue after the SEC and CFTC, you know, more coming together is down to the wire, I guess you would say in December when it's done.
And here we are in the final quarter of 2025.
The Genius Act passed earlier this summer, but with this government shutdown in place, at least for now, what is your timeline when it comes to market structure?
So the market structure legislation unfortunately shutdown has already delayed it a little bit, so there was supposed to be a market.
A vote in the Senate Banking Committee happening on Tuesday.
Unfortunately that did get delayed.
And so what we're seeing now is that maybe we'll see in the 3rd week of October or if not later, we'll have that vote happening again.
We're still going to have that vote in the agriculture Committee.
So Senator Lambis is telling folks we're probably looking at probably the end of December is when we'll hopefully have that bill out of the Senate, and that's being optimistic.
I'm still holding from that timeline.
There's a lot facing Congress right now, but one thing's for sure, as long as the shutdown keeps going on.
It's going to be a little hard to get to that really important piece of legislation as well as get a lot of the policy regs from the agency.
So hopefully the shutdown comes to an end pretty soon and hopefully we can get forward on mark structure because as we all know, 2026 is an election year and things do grind to a halt in DC come springtime usually.
Yeah, well, the countdown is on to year end as well as the beginning of 2026 already, but Ron, you and I were here on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the center of tradie.
So I do want to get your take on token. because when it comes to trad versus DI, there are a lot of conversations taking place.
So what rules do you think are necessary right now?
For deadly we see a clear rules of the road, it comes a tokenization.
There's a plethora of views out there, and the good thing is that the SEC is being very transparent in who are they meeting with, but also what they're saying.
The list on the website every single response they've gotten from companies and stakeholders, and overall we've seen some more traditional finance players pumping the brakes.
Say nicely on tokenized equities, whereas most folks like Rob Hood, Coinbase, Wintermute, and several others are saying, hey, we think the market's ready to go and we can bring a lot of efficiencies to tokenized equities to Tradify and we've seen a lot of folks at Tradify embrace that.
There's been some larger players that are opposed to that and so we're seeing some of those lobbying efforts in DC right now, and that's where my role comes in for winter mutes.
But overall, the intersection of Tradify and crypto is great, and I think a lot of folks in Trapy have been ready for this for quite some time.
There are just some large incumbents unfortunately we're seeing like the banks, for example, with the stablecoin bill who aren't ready for it and they've been pushing some roadblocks in DC.
So overall though, the crypto industry has been incredibly successful in DC, and I remember when it was just a team of 2 or 3 lobbyists, including myself, back in the day of 2018, 2019, and now it's over 100 folks in DC on the lobbying policy side.
That's still very minor compared to what the banks have, but crypto has been, you know, an underdog in a lot of stories, and DC is no exception, and they've done really well.
Yeah, and finally, Ron, before I let you go, you have nearly a decade of regulatory experience here.
So tell us about the institutional partnerships that you're working on at Wintermute.
Overall it's been really exciting.
So we just actually launched our US office actually, so it's me and a couple of folks in Soho right now in more of the ECenter we call it the Crypto WeWork, and right now we're having a lot of good conversations both with Tradify and crypto companies, but the one thing we'll say is that the United States is back, and that's been really exciting to see because for years we saw a lot of innovation.
In flight, a lot of companies say, Hey, we're going to be in Dubai or we're going to be out in Singapore or Switzerland, and now they're all coming back, including folks like Wintermute.
So we're really excited to kind of continue that legacy and keep going and to keep building, keep winning here and the future is crypto intratify and the convergence is happening right now as we're sitting right here.
So exciting to see where the next steps are and where it's going to take us.
OK, Ron, well thank you so much for joining us live from the New York Stock Exchange and thank you so much for all your insight.
Thanks for having me.
Really.
