Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis is delivering on her promise to get a cryptocurrency bill to Congress this year.

The staunch Bitcoin supporter representing the state of Wyoming won’t be alone in her effort to get fellow congressmen to pass the law—she will work hand in hand with Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

The two lawmakers are currently putting together a broad-based regulatory framework that will enable the crypto industry to be regulated in the future, Gillibrand said at a Politico Live event on Thursday afternoon.

An innovative sandbox with regulatory sideboards

Senator Lummis has been teasing the release of a comprehensive crypto bill for months. She has inadvertently become the crypto industry’s biggest ally in Congress, pushing a progressive regulatory agenda that would see Bitcoin become a fully-regulated asset.

The work Lummis is doing with Senator Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, has the potential to be groundbreaking for the industry. If the two succeed in passing the bill in Congress, it would make it the first major bipartisan framework for regulating digital assets in the U.S. While there have been other similar legislative efforts, all have either been limited in scope or have broken along party lines.

Both Gillibrand and Lummis seem extremely confident that they’ll be able to hammer out the details for the bill and have it before Congress in the next few weeks.

“Many of the goals that Senator Lummis and I have are identical—we want to address things like safety and soundness, we want to address consumer protection, we want to address safety for markets,” Gillibrand explained. “The work we’re doing is going to be a very complex and intensive review of different aspects of the industry.”

This includes banking, taxes, privacy, and consumer protection, she said at the Politico event.

Lummis noted that the federal government has just begun catching up with individual states when it comes to regulating the crypto market.

“I can’t tell you how big a change there is in the interest of Congress in this issue.”

Surprisingly, the crypto industry itself has also been one of the main drivers of regulation. Lummis said that countless companies and projects in the U.S. have been working with the government, telling them what they need in terms of a regulatory framework and how they need the regulators to act. A sandbox of innovation that still has clear regulatory sideboards is the sweet spot she and Senator Gillibrand are trying to create with the bill, Lummis explained.

Bringing peace to the battle between the SEC and CFTC

None of the previous regulatory efforts we’ve seen come out of the U.S. government have been particularly fruitful. All attempts to regulate the industry resulted in an aggressive swing from the market, but their impact is yet to be felt by the industry.

The coveted $550 billion infrastructure bill signed by U.S. President Joe Biden last year had the potential to put the industry to a halt, but intervention from Lummis and other pro-crypto senators eased the pressure by introducing clearer definitions of various crypto terms.

And while no harm was done, the bill failed to bring the regulatory clarity the industry has been looking for.

The executive order Biden signed earlier this month had the potential to bring meaningful changes to crypto regulation, but it too failed to introduce any concrete changes to how the government and its agencies see cryptocurrencies.

What the executive order did was demand a government-wide assessment of all U.S. policies regarding cryptocurrencies. It also highlighted the need to encourage innovation and address vulnerabilities around investor and consumer protection. However, the main goal of the executive order is to protect national security and give the U.S. government any semblance of control over the digital assets that have been flowing freely through its economy for over a decade.

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