Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith will resign next month from her role at the prominent crypto-focused industry group that helped elect the U.S.’ first pro-crypto president to lead Layer-1 blockchain Solana’s new policy push. 

Smith will begin a new role as president of Solana’s Policy Institute on May 19, she said Tuesday in an X post. Her last day at the Blockchain Association will be May 16. 

The Blockchain Association’s Board of Directors has already begun the search for Smith’s successor, the group’s communications lead Curtis Kincaid told Decrypt.  

“We’ve grown from a small group of passionate advocates into a leading force in Washington, D.C., and beyond,” Smith said in the X post. “Blockchain Association today is stronger than ever.” 

Founded in 2018, the Blockchain Association is one of several industry groups that has fought to advance the crypto industry’s interests on Capitol Hill. Their efforts helped lead to the election of pro-crypto President Donald Trump last November—a watershed moment for an industry that had previously existed on tenterhooks.

But as digital asset firms’ clout in Washington D.C. has grown, so too have calls to enshrine even more of the industry’s interests into law. To meet that demand, a few Layer-1 blockchains have launched policy institutes. Now, Solana is joining them.

Edited by James Rubin

House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill (R-AR) said Monday that the personal cryptocurrency dealings of President Donald Trump and his family have made drafting legislation for the novel sector “more complicated,” in a rare rebuke of the president’s personal activities by a key member of congressional Republican leadership.

Hill specifically named the president’s meme coin and stablecoin projects as two endeavors that have negatively impacted the work of lawmakers racing to create rules for the digital assets industry.   

“They have made our work more complicated,” Hill told reporters Monday, in reference to those projects.

Since returning to power, Trump and his inner circle have rapidly expanded their crypto portfolios at the same time that the president is determining policies with direct impact on those same assets and sectors. In recent months, Trump and business partners have launched a Solana meme coin and an Ethereum decentralized finance platform called World Liberty Financial, which recently announced its own stablecoin. 

Meme coins are speculative crypto assets that derive their value from cultural significance—and which the SEC recently likened to “collectibles”—while stablecoins are digital assets designed to keep a steady peg to the U.S. dollar.

Trump and his family have already netted hundreds of millions of dollars from such endeavors; unrealized earnings from the same projects number in the billions. 

Trump’s existing businesses have also aggressively expanded their exposure to crypto in the same period. Last week, the company that runs the president’s Truth Social media platform announced a partnership with Crypto.com to offer crypto ETFs. 

Just this morning, the president’s son, Eric and Don Jr, inked a deal to launch their own Bitcoin mining venture. 

At the same time, the president has signed multiple executive orders with direct impact on the crypto industry. Further, White House officials are currently, at his direction, working with Republicans in Congress to help shape key pieces of legislation that will create, for the first time, an American crypto regulatory regime. 

Earlier this month, the president’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, dismissed the president’s personal crypto endeavors as “irrelevant” to industry regulation. 

But it appears patience among congressional Republicans over the scope of those lucrative schemes may be waning. The House Financial Services Committee is set to mark up its version of proposed stablecoin legislation, the STABLE Act, on Wednesday, and will soon consider a newer version of a market structure bill, according to comments made by Chair Hill Monday.

A parallel stablecoin bill is also currently making its way through the Senate. Such bills, if passed into law, would for the first time offer a clear path to legal certainty for a variety of crypto projects and companies, based on their compliance with new rules currently being ironed out. Their passage is anticipated to bring with it a wave of investment and support for the crypto industry from traditional finance institutions that until now have been waiting on the sidelines.

Though those bills possess bipartisan support, Trump’s personal business dealings have offered resistant Democrats a convenient means to protest their passage. 

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) denounced the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial stablecoin, USD1, as a “grift,” and tied the project to pending crypto legislation. 

“Congress should step up and fix the current stablecoin bill moving through the Senate that will make it easier for Trump—and Elon Musk—to take control of your money,” she said.

In a potential sign of brewing tensions regarding key language in multiple stablecoin bills circulating in Congress, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said this week he doesn’t believe stablecoin issuers like Tether should have to comply with the anti-money laundering Bank Secrecy Act—a major sticking point of both the Senate’s stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, and the House’s parallel STABLE Act. 

Including such a provision in the legislation would unfairly box out foreign issuers, Emmer argues. The lawmaker believes stablecoin issuers, regardless of jurisdiction, should not be subject to the stringent anti-money laundering rules under the Bank Secrecy Act.

“The protections the so-called Bank Secrecy Act is supposed to provide were drafted for cash, and this is blockchain-driven,” Emmer told Decrypt Wednesday evening. “And guess what, everything on the blockchain is open and transparent to people who understand how to follow code.”

“It’s pretty interesting to say that the Bank Secrecy Act—which doesn’t even contemplate this type of technology, a digital asset—should be what we’re using,” the congressman added. 

Stablecoins are digital assets typically pegged to the U.S. dollar and designed to keep a steady price. They’re used by cryptocurrency traders to enter and exit positions without the need for dollars, and used as dollar equivalents in markets where dollars are restricted or inaccessible.

The latest drafts of the GENIUS Act and STABLE Act treat all stablecoin issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. The law, enacted in 1970, established a stringent set of proactive anti-money laundering rules that American banks must comply with in order to operate. 

The Bank Secrecy Act, for example, obligates regulated institutions to engage in suspicious activity monitoring, undergo routine audits, hire compliance officers, and adopt a customer identification program mandated by the Patriot Act—the controversial law that expanded government surveillance powers shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Such requirements would pose quite a hurdle for existing foreign stablecoin issuers like Tether, the company behind USDT and the market’s undisputed leader. Tether, whose USDT stablecoin boasts a market capitalization in excess of $144 billion, is based in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and plans to move to El Salvador—but nonetheless is one of the world’s biggest purchasers of U.S. Treasuries, which it uses as collateral to back its U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin.

In its current setup, Tether enjoys much less strict regulation than the Bank Secrecy Act would mandate, and the company’s leadership has implied that moves to force all stablecoin issuers to comply with such rules would hurt the firm and aid its competitors. By contrast, Circle, the issuer behind the market’s second-largest stablecoin USDC, is already based in the United States. While Circle does not yet comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, the company is regulated as a money transmitter by the New York Department of Financial Services.

Circle is also already in compliance with the European Union’s elaborate MiCA regulatory framework, a move Tether has resisted.

As stablecoin legislation in the U.S. nears a crescendo, questions have emerged regarding whether Tether would come to the United States if it had to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act—or, alternatively, what would happen if the stablecoin market’s top player was boxed out of American financial markets. 

Emmer does not want to risk locking Tether, or any other foreign issuer, out of the burgeoning U.S. stablecoin sector. 

“We’ve got to let everybody compete in this space,” he said. 

That doesn’t mean Tether wouldn’t have to comply with certain rules in order to operate in the United States. To Emmer, the sticking point is proof of reserves—showing the government that your token is backed up with sufficient collateral to keep its value pegged to the dollar even in periods of market volatility. 

To that end, Emmer believes Tether is, broadly speaking, doing well. In 2021, the company partnered with Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald to help custody some of the $92 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries it claims to currently hold in reserve. 

“Tether has done a great job straightening itself out in the last four years,” Emmer said. 

The House Financial Services Committee is set to mark up the STABLE Act during a session next week. Meanwhile, the GENIUS Act already passed out of the Senate Banking Committee earlier this month with strong bipartisan support—Bank Secrecy language intact. It is likely to face a full vote on the Senate floor in the coming months.