The Ways and Means Committee marked up H.R. 10357 on Wednesday morning, a day after the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate. The bill waives tax on network fees of $10 or less from 2028, but settles only that staking and mining rewards are ordinary income, not when they are taxed.
The House Ways and Means Committee opened a markup of H.R. 10357, the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, at 10 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday. The committee's notice lists the bill alongside six unrelated measures and posts its text, a Joint Committee on Taxation description, a chairman's amendment in the nature of a substitute and a revenue-effects table. The Block reported that the committee approved the bill 38-5. As of 18:30 UTC no other newsroom had published the result, and the committee had not posted a roll call.
The concession to everyday crypto use is narrower than the phrase "de minimis" suggests. Section 101 of the bill text provides that "no gain or loss shall be recognized on the disposition of a digital asset in payment of" a de minimis network fee or a de minimis transaction fee, and sets the threshold at $10. Spending a coin is a disposal under current law, so paying a fraction of a token in gas technically produces a gain or loss on that fraction. The bill waives the calculation for the fee, and for the fee only. The transaction the fee pays for is unaffected.
It also excludes the people who transact most. The relief does not reach "a trader, broker, or dealer in digital assets," nor anyone who made more than 5,000 transfers of digital assets in the preceding taxable year. And it applies to dispositions after December 31, 2027, which leaves ordinary users two more filing seasons under the existing rule before the first return can claim it. Senator Cynthia Lummis had pushed a $300-per-transaction exemption, as Unchained noted; this is a different and much smaller thing.
What the industry pressed hardest for is not in the bill at all. Title IV settles that income from validation activity is ordinary income. It does not settle when that income arises. Unchained reported that Chairman Jason Smith described in June letting miners and stakers "treat this income like self-created property, depending on which method best matches the timing and character of the rewards," and that the flexibility does not appear in the introduced text. Decrypt reached the same reading of the provision.
Representative Steven Horsford, a Nevada Democrat, said so on the record. "This bill is not as comprehensive as I would have liked, but I continue to believe that Congress needs to address when mining and staking rewards are recognized as income," he said, according to The Block. "This package establishes ordinary income treatment, but leaves that timing question unresolved." Horsford and Representative Max Miller reintroduced the PARITY Act in April, which would have deferred tax on staking and mining rewards until the tokens were sold. That deferral did not survive into this bill.
The rest of the text is closer to what the industry expected. Section 301 extends the wash-sale rule to a traded digital asset, a change that would end the practice of selling at a loss and buying the token straight back. Section 201 extends the securities-lending treatment in section 1058 to traded digital assets, so that lending a token is not itself a taxable sale. Section 103 sets the basis of a qualified U.S. dollar stablecoin acquired in a sale or exchange at its redemption value, which would end the small gains and losses that arise when a token trades marginally off its peg. Title V directs Treasury to stand up a digital asset voluntary disclosure program, and the bill gives it a year to do so.
Smith called the vote "a historic moment for this Committee: after more than a year of working together, Republican and Democrat Members have come together to establish the first-ever tax framework for digital assets." Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas voted the other way and described the bill as one that "still bestows billions in tax breaks for the crypto industry, benefiting billionaire crypto whales and some of the richest Americans like the Trump family." Both quotes come from The Block's account of the markup.
The timing is awkward for a committee claiming a first. The markup came a day after the CLARITY Act fell 11 votes short of the 60 it needed to open Senate debate, a failure that turned on an ethics provision rather than on market structure, and that followed weeks of pressure on the handful of Senate Democrats whose votes were in play. Alison Mangiero, chief strategy officer at the Crypto Council for Innovation, told The Block that with the House expected to recess, the tax bill "will likely be taken up during the lame duck period," and that attention now turns to the Senate Finance Committee.
Nothing in the package is law. A committee vote sends a bill to the House floor and no further, and the House is expected to recess until after the November elections. Even on the most favorable path, the one provision written for ordinary holders does not touch a transaction until 2028, and the question Horsford raised stays open until some later bill answers it.
