The latest draft of the U.S. Senate’s stablecoin legislation includes enough changes that Democratic senators may now have an easier time getting back on board, though consumer advocates say it still falls short.

The bill to set oversight and standards for stablecoin issuers sailed through the Senate Banking Committee with wide bipartisan support in March, but it hit a wall on the Senate floor last week as many Democrats raised objections. Chief among them were the conflicts that may be presented by President Donald Trump’s own crypto interests and the possibility that big technology firms like Meta and social-media site X may be able to issue such tokens.

«As the result of hard-fought negotiations, Democrats won major victories on a range of critical issues,» proponents noted in a summary circulated with the draft bill. The question remaining is: Will it be enough to get back to a so-called cloture vote that will advance the bill to a floor debate that would mark its final major stage before the Senate takes a vote.

The next procedural move on the Senate floor could come by next week, according to people familiar with the talks.

The latest changes to the bill represent a mixed bag. The loudest requests from critics, that the president be explicitly stopped from personally benefiting from the crypto industry that his administration will regulate, were not directly addressed in this version of the bill.

But on the concerns over tech giants sprouting with a field of new dollar-based tokens, the bill dealt with it in part:

«A public company that is not predominantly engaged in one or more financial activities, and its wholly or majority owned subsidiaries or affiliates, may not issue a payment stablecoin unless the public company obtains a unanimous vote of the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee,» according to the latest draft. The committee would be a multi-agency group created under the legislation to look at such requests.

There are major loopholes in that, according to Mark Hays, who focuses on crypto and financial-technology issues for Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. For starters, he said, it affects only public companies and not private ones, such as X and TiKTok.

«There’s already a way that large tech firms that aren’t public could become issuers without adhering to these new standards,» he said. Also, he added, «it’s quite possible under this bill that a public company could secure an interest in a non-public company, and that’s another way around it.»

He argued that this overall draft gave toothless answers to the concern of consumer advocates.

«Pushing this through on an arbitrary deadline because the crypto industry is breathing down your neck is not a good way to make policy,» Hays said. «And it’s especially bad when that policy could further enable and enrich the president.»

Bo Hines, one of Trump’s chief advisers on crypto, appeared at Consensus 2025 in Toronto on Wednesday to insist that there’s no conflict in the president’s business interests or his family’s involvement in the industry, including its stake in World Liberty Financial. He said that Trump «can’t be bought.»

The White House’s Hines, who acts as a liaison to Capitol Hill during the legislative negotiations, expressed continued confidence about the effort staying on track in the Senate.

«Negotiations are ongoing,» Hines said at Consensus. «But I remain steadfast in my optimism that we’re going to achieve — the president’s desire is to do it — both stablecoin legislation and market structure legislation before the August recess.»

The SEC has been investigating crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) over whether it misstated its user numbers in past securities filings and marketing materials.

The probe began under the former presidential administration while the SEC was still under the control of then-Chair Gary Gensler, according to the NYT, which first reported the story, but has persisted under the SEC’s current, crypto-friendly leadership.

The metric at the heart of the investigation is Coinbase’s claim to have over 100 million “verified users.” It stopped using the metric in both disclosure and marketing materials in 2021, the year it went public on the Nasdaq.

Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, told CoinDesk in an emailed statement that the SEC’s investigation is a “hold-over investigation from the prior administration about a metric we stopped reporting two and a half years ago, which was fully disclosed to the public.”

“We explained that the verified users metric includes anyone who verified their email address or phone number with us, so it may overstate the number of unique customers,» said Grewal «We also disclosed – and continue to disclose – the more relevant metric of ‘monthly transacting users’ – the number of people who use our platform in a given month.»

“While we strongly believe this investigation should not continue, we remain committed to working with the SEC to bring this matter to a close,” Grewal added.

The SEC did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment by press time.

Already under pressure due to today’s disclosure of a data breach, COIN shares dipped a bit further on this SEC news, now down 6.6% on the session.

TORONTO —Eric Trump, the son of U.S. President Donald Trump, said he believes bitcoin is digital gold and called the largest digital currency a store of value, during a packed panel at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

«I really believe in digital gold, which is bitcoin, right? I believe in the store of value,» Trump said.

However, Eric Trump — who has a background in real estate — told the crowd at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto that he didn’t get into bitcoin or crypto until politics intertwined the Trump family and the crypto community.

«It wasn’t until the very same group that was attacking my family for no reason whatsoever other than political beliefs, started attacking [the] crypto community that it really drove two people who might not have always been like-minded together and that partnership has been absolutely amazing,» he said Thursday.

Aside from politics, he also realized real estate is not as liquid as bitcoin, which has better liquidity and was easier to transact, solidifying his belief in the digital currency. «I also realized, kind of, through some of that political weaponization, you know, some of the limitations of real estate. Real estate has created tremendous wealth for our family. At the same time, real estate can’t be transferred. It’s very hard to sell,» he said.

«I sold a hotel two years ago. It took me a year and a half to literally transact that hotel because you have title reports and you have managers that have to go in, and you have best proliferations. You do all sorts of things,» Trump said. «… You constantly have to manage it. You constantly have to watch operations, right? And then all of a sudden, you’ve got this kind of digital asset which you don’t need to watch, you don’t need to manage. You know, it’s easy to transact on.»

Trump is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a Bitcoin mining firm founded in partnership with Hut 8 and slated to go public via a merger with Gryphon Digital Mining (GRYP).

The Gryphon partnership came about from a desire to take the American Bitcoin partnership public as quickly as possible, said Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot on stage alongside Trump to a standing-room only crowd. An existing mining business was a key part of that plan as well as getting ‘American’ and ‘bitcoin’ as part of the company name.

«American Bitcoin, to me, is everything, you know. And I we came up with the name, I said one thing. I said, Listen, it has to have the word American, and it has to have the word Bitcoin in it,» Trump said.