Back in August, there were some dire warnings about what the Biden Administration’s proposed infrastructure bill might do to the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector by driving crypto miners out of the United States, crippling America's leadership role, etc. In response, the crypto industry mobilized a full-court-lobbying press on lawmakers. However, it was too late to excise the troubling digital-asset language, and, in November, the infrastructure bill was signed into law.
The good news is that the infrastructure law won’t take effect until January 2024, which allows lots of time to patch up its shortcomings. The downside is that its worrisome aspects — particularly an expanded definition of who or what is a “broker” and some new digital-asset reporting requirements — haven’t gone away. As Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, noted in mid November shortly after the bill’s signing, the “bad [crypto] language” is now enshrined in law.