U.S. lawmakers take another swing at crypto tax policy with revised bill

Congressmen Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and Max Miller (R-Ohio) re-introduced their Digital Asset Protection, Accountability, Regulation, Innovation, Taxation and Yields (PARITY) Act late last month, seeking to update how the U.S. addresses crypto and taxes.

Congress is going to address taxes (in general) in the coming months, and crypto may end up part of this. It’s pretty important for anyone in the U.S. who owns any crypto at all, given they will have to report on their digital asset holdings and transactions.

The PARITY Act was first released in discussion draft form last December and re-released on March 26 for further review.

The most immediately visible change appears to be the section addressing “de minimis” gains. De minimis exemptions generally allow for certain transactions to be exempted from tax reporting. Under such an exemption, people don’t have to report the transaction, or worry about the tax burden that might otherwise follow.

The industry has long sought a de minimis exemption for small transactions, which could make it easier for individuals to do things like buy coffee without having to report a capital gain or loss on the crypto used in that transaction. The December 2025 version of the PARITY Act began with a section addressing de minimis exemptions for payments made via “regulated payment stablecoins,” with a note saying the threshold would be $200.

While the section did not appear to extend these exemptions to digital assets like Bitcoin BTC$74,390.77, the note went on to say that it pointed to stablecoins specifically because of the GENIUS Act.

The March 2026 version of the text did not explicitly say there should be a de minimis exemption, but portions seemed to address that concern:

“In the case of any sale of a regulated payment stablecoin, no gain or loss shall be recognized on such sale unless the taxpayer’s basis in such stablecoin is less than 99 percent of the redemption value of such stablecoin,” the bill said. It removed the $200 threshold and created a deemed basis of $1 for exchanges, which are separate from sales of the stablecoin.

The latest draft would also apply wash sale rules to digital asset transactions, which is not a particularly controversial position — Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) even included wash sale provisions in her tax bill last year.

This bill would also draw a distinction between “passive staking” and activities like trading.

It’s unclear what the next steps for this bill might be; while there is talk about a reconciliation tax bill, and U.S. President Donald Trump revealed his fiscal year 2027 budget requests, it is far from certain that the reconciliation bill will happen or that crypto will be part of it.

Nevertheless, conversations with industry participants over the past few weeks suggest that there will be a strong push to include crypto in any tax legislation that’s likely to become law.

Editor’s note: This article was originally sent as part of CoinDesk’s State of Crypto newsletter earlier this month.