Crypto: stablecoins would receive special treatment
The most visible measure concerns payments.
Today, the IRS generally treats digital assets as property. Spending crypto can therefore trigger a taxable event, even when it is used for an ordinary payment. BrefCrypto has already detailed how the GENIUS Act is gradually turning stablecoins into genuine financial infrastructure in the United States.
The ADAPT Act would remove some of that friction.
A consumer using a qualified dollar stablecoin to purchase a good or service would generally no longer have to recognize a gain or loss on that transaction. Brokers would also be exempt from certain reporting requirements for these consumer payments. Traders and market makers would not receive the exemption.
Not all stablecoins would qualify.
The token would notably have to comply with the GENIUS Act, appear on a list published quarterly by the Treasury and have maintained its value within less than 3% of 1 dollar. The taxpayer would also have had to acquire it within that same range.
Another highly practical provision: blockchain fees paid in crypto could be excluded from gain or loss calculations when they do not exceed 10 dollars per transaction.
Paying a few dollars in gas would therefore no longer require a mini tax filing.
Wash-sale rules would finally reach crypto
The relief for payments comes with a much less welcome trade-off for traders.
The bill would extend the wash-sale rules already applied to certain securities to digital assets. An investor could no longer sell crypto at a loss solely to record the loss for tax purposes and then buy back nearly the same asset immediately.
The traditional window is 30 days.
Until now, this difference from stocks has been one of the main tools in crypto tax-loss harvesting. The ADAPT Act would close that gap for traded digital assets, with several exceptions and transitional rules. Qualified stablecoins would not be treated exactly like other assets, while certain recurring purchases, staking rewards and mining rewards would be covered by exceptions in the bill.
Tokenized stocks would not offer an easy way around the rule either: a tokenized version of a stock could be considered substantially identical to the underlying security.
This approach reflects what Daines has argued before the Finance Committee since July: when crypto functions like a traditional financial asset, traditional tax principles should apply. When blockchain genuinely creates a new situation, the tax code should be adapted.
That is also why staking is already the subject of a separate tax battle in Congress.
The bill still has to survive Congress
The ADAPT Act goes well beyond stablecoins and wash sales.
The bill also includes provisions covering staking, mining, lending, constructive sales, investment trusts, passive validation and certain donations of digital assets. Most of the changes would apply to transactions or tax years beginning after December 31, 2026, if the bill became law.
But nothing has changed yet for taxpayers.
The bill must go through committee work before it can reach the Senate floor. The House is pursuing its own route with the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, which the Ways and Means Committee approved on September 16 by 38 votes to 5. The two bills overlap on several issues but are not identical.
The Senate proposal notably offers narrower stablecoin relief than the House version: it focuses on purchases of goods and services and does not treat all conversions into dollars in the same way.
The political backdrop also remains complicated. The CLARITY Act has just demonstrated how difficult a crypto bill can become in the Senate, even after months of negotiations.
Daines’s bill is therefore not yet “the new US crypto tax system.”
It does, however, point to a much clearer direction: Washington wants to make the everyday use of stablecoins almost invisible for tax purposes while gradually bringing crypto trading under the tax rules already imposed on Wall Street.
For users, the contrast is fairly simple.
Paying with a regulated stablecoin could become easier. Paying 5 dollars in gas could as well. But selling Bitcoin or an altcoin solely to realize a tax loss before immediately buying it back would become much more difficult.
