The US House Ways and Means Committee approved on Wednesday the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, sending a proposal to overhaul cryptocurrency taxation to the full House.
The committee announced the review on Monday, scheduling the session for lawmakers to review H.R. 10357, consider amendments and vote on whether to send it to the full House.
"This wasn't built overnight," said committee chairman Jason Smith in a statement, crediting more than a year of bipartisan work.
"The legislation before us today is the product of that work, bringing clarity, parity and enforceability to digital asset taxation and helping keep the United States as the world's cryptocurrency capital, rather than pushing this innovation, and the jobs that come with it, overseas," Smith said.
For crypto users, the proposal would remove gain or loss calculations on qualified network or transaction fees of US$10 or less. Paying such fees with tokens can trigger tax accounting because digital assets are treated as property. The relief would begin in 2028 and would apply to eligible fee payments, not to small crypto purchases in general.
The bill would simplify tax calculations for qualified dollar-pegged stablecoins trading close to their redemption value, would classify mining and staking rewards as ordinary income, and would allow certain investment funds to stake assets without losing their tax status solely because of that. It excludes an earlier proposal that would have let taxpayers defer recognition of some mining and staking rewards.
It would also extend "wash-sale" rules to traded digital assets, generally deferring loss deductions when investors acquire substantially identical assets within 30 days before or after a sale. Qualified crypto loans would not be treated as sales, and eligible taxpayers could correct previous returns through a new disclosure programme, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
The tax bill advanced a day after the Senate failed to advance the separate Clarity Act, which addresses oversight of the crypto market. The SEC and the CFTC have since pledged to pursue crypto rules under their existing powers.
The tax proposal still requires approval from both chambers in identical form and the president's signature before becoming law.
"I look forward to continuing this work as we move forward with these policies," Smith said.
* Translated and edited with permission from Decrypt.
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