Opinion: The delay of the US Senate's cryptocurrency market structure bill has increased regulatory uncertainty, putting pressure on related assets.

Alex Thorn, research director at Galaxy Digital, stated that the postponement of the Senate Banking Committee's scheduled review of the crypto market structure bill highlights deep divisions between Congress and industry on several key issues, particularly stablecoin yield mechanisms and DeFi-related provisions. This postponement occurred hours after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong withdrew his support for the bill. Armstrong publicly opposed wording in the bill concerning tokenized securities, DeFi restrictions, and stablecoin yields. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott subsequently announced a postponement of the hearing, but has not yet released a new timetable. With the Senate adjourning next week, the earliest possible resumption date is between January 26th and 30th. Thorn pointed out that within just 48 hours, the draft bill was released late at night, and over 100 amendments were submitted, with stakeholders continuing to discover new points of contention at the last minute, significantly increasing the difficulty of political coordination. At the market level, following the announcement of the delay, crypto assets generally declined, with Bitcoin and Ethereum falling by approximately 2% that day; related US stocks also came under pressure, with Coinbase falling 6.5%, Robinhood falling 7.8%, and Circle falling 9.7%. In his analysis, Thorn believes that although there is a considerable consensus on the "market structure" itself, a difficult-to-bridge political divide has formed around non-core but highly sensitive issues such as stablecoin yields, DeFi compliance, and granting the SEC regulatory tools in the area of ​​tokenized securities. "The surface differences in the disagreements are not large, but the actual gap is deep."