Crypto Week in Congress has turned chaotic. And while a smooth process may have been too much to expect, few could have predicted the legislative event would be nearly derailed—and irreparably damaged, policy leaders say—by a combination of Jeffrey Epstein and a digital “mark of the beast.”
Crypto leaders, House Republicans, and the White House rolled into Monday with a prideful plan to take over Washington with “Crypto Week”: a five day legislation bonanza poised to climax with the signing of one major crypto bill into law, and the hand-off of another from the House to the Senate.
But the effort sputtered, due largely to variables that weren’t even on stakeholders’ radars just three days ago: ongoing angst from President Donald Trump’s MAGA base over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and concerns over the potential for a federally issued central bank digital currency—which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) likened to a sign of the Antichrist.
Though Republican leadership anticipated vocal pushback on passage of the bills from certain Democrats livid over President Trump’s personal crypto ventures, the true threat to Crypto Week ultimately emerged from the MAGA flank of the GOP.
And as right-wing protests over the digital asset bills continue to metastasize, Democrats—even those who consider themselves to be proudly pro-crypto—have begun abandoning the legislation, citing critiques from the left.
Signs of major trouble first emerged on Tuesday, when 12 Republican hardliners tanked a procedural vote that would have allowed three crypto bills to move towards final floor votes: the GENIUS Act (a Senate-drafted stablecoin bill), the CLARITY Act (a House bill on crypto market structure), and a bill that would outlaw the creation of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, in the United States.
President Trump then summoned the holdout Republicans to the White House Tuesday evening, where, according to those same Republicans, he promised to add language banning CBDCs to the CLARITY Act in exchange for their “yes” votes to proceed with considering all of the crypto bills on the House floor.
That reported deal quickly dissolved in the harsh daylight of Wednesday, however. That morning, Rep. Greene, typically an ardent Trump supporter, and one of the Republicans who voted against considering the crypto bills, ripped up any notion of a truce with the White House by denigrating the GENIUS Act and comparing it to “the mark of the beast,” a biblical symbol associated with the Antichrist.
Republicans have long assailed the hypothetical prospect of the federal government creating its own digital dollar, which they say would threaten financial privacy. Other countries around the world, such as China, have already rolled out CBDCs, which allow their governments to more closely monitor financial transactions and, at least in theory if not already in practice, place limits or restrictions on certain purchases. The U.S. currently has no known plans to develop such a digital currency.
“It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name,” Greene posted Wednesday, quoting the Book of Revelations, in reference to her stated fears about the GENIUS Act.
Multiple D.C. insiders told Decrypt that fears about CBDCs may not be the only factor influencing the crypto votes of MAGA hardliners like Greene.
In recent days, President Trump has come increasingly under fire for his administration’s handling of the fallout over deceased financier, convicted sex offender, and alleged trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Department of Justice announced last week that a list of Epstein’s clients did not exist, despite prior statements from department leadership to the contrary. Many MAGA Republicans, including Greene, have pushed back on that conclusion and Trump’s increasingly agitated defense of it. On Wednesday, Trump lashed out at those Republicans still interested in the Epstein saga, calling them “weaklings” whose support he no longer wanted.
Hours later, and shortly after posting her repudiation of the GENIUS Act, Greene announced she would cosponsor legislation to ensure the Epstein files were released and pledged to never “protect pedophiles or the elites and their circles.”
One D.C. insider told Decrypt they believe Epstein-related fractures within the MAGA movement have been “100%” involved in the crypto-related House Republican tailspin.
A representative for Greene did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
On Wednesday afternoon, a re-do of the failed procedural vote on the House’s three crypto bills blew up in even more theatrical fashion than on the first occasion, with House Republican leadership refusing to greenlight the addition of anti-CBDC language in the years-in-the-making, ostensibly bipartisan CLARITY Act. Republican hardliners then rejected the re-do procedural vote, which leadership refused to close after hours in limbo.
Why did House Republicans reject the demands? Because anti-CBDC language would all-but certainly derail support for CLARITY among pro-crypto Democrats, whose votes House Republican leadership needs to give the legislation enough momentum to succeed in the Senate, sources familiar with the matter told Decrypt.
And prior to Wednesday, House Republicans were already having enough trouble selling CLARITY across the aisle. Pro-crypto Democrats had already begun fleeing from the legislation, citing a refusal of House Republicans to consider tweaks to language in the bill regarding regulating fraud and crime in the DeFi space—the trading of crypto assets that happens natively on blockchain networks—which the CLARITY Act mostly avoids in its current form.
Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-CA), one such pro-crypto Democrat and who represents much of Silicon Valley, told Decrypt Wednesday he could no longer support CLARITY given Republicans’ refusal to add “a very modest approach to self-regulation” for DeFi to the bill.
“That is going to come back to bite us," Liccardo said. "In a year or two, everyone's going to ask the question, ‘Why is all this fraud and crime happening?’ And Congress decided not to regulate [DeFi] in any substantial way."
Further, the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country and a powerful force in Democratic politics, took the rare step this week of wading into financial policy and explicitly warning House Democrats not to vote for either CLARITY or GENIUS.
Such problems with Democrats would have gotten even worse, one crypto policy leader told Decrypt, if House Republican leadership acquiesced to the demands of hardliners like Greene and added anti-CBDC language to the CLARITY Act.
“This kills market structure,” the policy leader said Wednesday, referencing the prospect of a deal among Republicans to make that change to the legislation.
But late Wednesday night, after the longest vote in House history, House Republicans emerged with a deal to add anti-CBDC language to a pending defense spending bill, and keep crypto legislation as-is. Republican leadership now plans to bring all three crypto bills up for individual votes this afternoon.
While the breakthrough now all-but guarantees the passage of the GENIUS Act, the mayhem of the last few days has almost equally likely doomed the prospect of the House’s market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, ever becoming law, crypto policy leaders told Decrypt.
Even if CLARITY narrowly passes the House this afternoon, it will all-but certainly be dead-on-arrival in the Senate, given the bloodiness of this week’s proceedings and the bill's likely meager bipartisan support, one policy leader said.
Another industry expert likened the week’s events to a plotline in the HBO series “House of the Dragon,” in which a king must decide whether to let his pregnant wife and unborn baby both die, or kill his wife to save the child. The queen, the industry expert said, is the CLARITY Act, and her treacherous time in labor represents the current state of affairs in Congress.
“Either way, the queen is dead,” they said.
