A 114-page House tax package would exempt small blockchain fees from tax, extend wash-sale rules to digital assets and leave the mining and staking fight unresolved ahead of Wednesday’s markup.
The House Ways and Means Committee has released a sweeping crypto tax package that would exempt certain network fees under 10 USD from tax while extending wash-sale rules to digital assets, setting up a Wednesday markup that will determine whether the most detailed tax framework Congress has produced for the industry advances this session.
Bloomberg Government reported on Sept. 15 that committee Chair Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican, released the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act on Monday night after months in which lawmakers worked through separate proposals covering the tax treatment of digital assets. The 114-page package incorporates provisions from earlier Republican bills and bipartisan legislation from Reps. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and Max Miller, R-Ohio, spanning small transactions, gain and loss calculations, transfers, wash sales, mining, staking and broker requirements.
Committee documents show H.R. 10357 is scheduled for markup at 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, where lawmakers will consider it alongside several unrelated tax and health care measures before deciding whether to advance the legislation.
The 10 USD fee exemption
The provision drawing the most attention from retail users would remove tax on qualifying network and transaction fees worth less than 10 USD, addressing the small blockchain costs that currently create their own taxable events. Under present law, digital assets are treated as property, so fees paid in tokens can technically generate gain or loss calculations of their own, a compliance burden wildly disproportionate to the amounts involved.
The carve-out is not universal. Anyone who completed more than 5,000 transfers during the previous year would be excluded, keeping the exemption away from high-velocity accounts, bots and market-making operations while preserving it for ordinary users.
Small transactions have been part of the House debate for months. In June, lawmakers weighed proposals intended to reduce filing requirements for digital asset users while setting rules for mining, staking and routine transactions. Coinbase pushed aggressively for relief during that process: in testimony submitted for a June 9 Ways and Means hearing, the exchange’s Vice President of Tax, Lawrence Zlatkin, argued that calculating gains and losses on routine stablecoin payments and blockchain fees creates significant compliance work, and the company formally called for the removal of tax on stablecoin spending and small transactions.
The timing reflects a reporting regime that is already tightening around taxpayers. IRS rules now require wallet-by-wallet basis tracking, brokers began reporting gross proceeds on Form 1099-DA for the 2025 tax year, and full cost-basis reporting is being phased in for transactions during 2026. Against that backdrop, a statutory de minimis threshold for fees would remove one of the most tedious categories from millions of annual filings.
Wash-sale rules arrive for crypto
The bill’s second major provision closes a gap that has defined crypto tax planning for a decade: the ability to sell an asset at a loss, buy it back immediately and still claim the loss. Federal wash-sale rules, which block that maneuver for stocks and securities, have never applied to digital assets because cryptocurrencies are not classified as securities under the tax code.
The Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act would extend wash-sale and constructive sale rules to digital assets, ending the practice ahead of what tax professionals expect to be a wave of year-end loss harvesting in a market that remains well below its highs. For investors, the change means harvested losses will require a genuine disposition, with a 30-day window on either side of the sale in which repurchases undo the deduction, mirroring the securities regime.
Notably, the package keeps qualified United States dollar stablecoins exempt from the wash-sale regime, preserving day-to-day payment use cases from the new restrictions.
Mining and staking deferral remains the sticking point
The package’s most contested element is also its least settled. Tax deferral for mining and staking rewards remains in dispute, with House Republicans weighing whether to retain, remove or limit the proposed treatment, under which rewards would not be taxed until the underlying tokens are sold rather than at receipt.
The deferral question carries real money at stake. Under current law, mined and staked tokens are taxed as ordinary income at fair market value on receipt, meaning miners and stakers owe tax on tokens they may not have converted to cash, sometimes at prices far above where they eventually sell. Industry groups have lobbied for deferral as a matter of competitiveness, arguing United States validators face a structural disadvantage relative to jurisdictions with friendlier treatment. Revenue scorers, meanwhile, count immediate taxation as a pay-for that any deferral proposal would need to replace.
The outcome of Wednesday’s markup will signal whether committee leadership believes it has the votes and the offset to keep deferral in the bill, or whether the provision gets trimmed to secure broader support.
Where the bill fits in a crowded week
The markup lands amid the busiest stretch of the crypto legislative calendar this year. The Senate is scheduled to move on CLARITY Act cloture Tuesday afternoon, Democratic counteroffers on that bill were still circulating Monday, and a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill faces a House committee vote of its own on Wednesday. The tax package, unlike the market-structure fights, is one where the industry’s asks, a fee de minimis, stablecoin payment relief and staking deferral, have enjoyed genuine bipartisan sponsorship.
If H.R. 10357 advances out of committee, it would become the vehicle for the first comprehensive crypto tax rewrite to clear either chamber’s committee process, with floor timing to be negotiated. If it stalls, its provisions are widely expected to be folded into larger tax legislation rather than discarded.
Either way, the era of assuming crypto tax rules will stay frozen is over. The question at Wednesday’s markup is not whether the rules change, but how much, and who pays for the transition.
10 am wednesday markup, same day as the fed decision and the CLARITY cloture vote. someone really wanted this bill buried in the news cycle
Exempting network fees under 10 dollars is genuinely useful for anyone actually using crypto as money. The wash-sale extension to digital assets though, thats the quiet part that stings
the wash-sale change alone kills the simplest trick in the book. no more harvesting a loss and rebuying the same coin 30 seconds later
you can still harvest, you just rotate into a different asset for the 30 days. annoying but hardly dead, people did this with stocks forever
rotating works fine for btc and eth but try it with a small cap that has one liquid sibling. you just swap your bag for a fully correlated one
the instant rebuy was nice while it lasted lol. still wondering how they even enforce this on defi wallets, feels like a self reported honor system
its an honor system exactly like you said. the 10 dollar fee exemption is whatever, but wash sale rules on self custody wallets is unenforceable without broker reporting. half the people this targets dont even use brokers anymore
exempting fees under 10 bucks is nice and all but the wash-sale extension just killed tax loss harvesting for everyone. classic give with one hand
114 pages and they still punted on mining and staking treatment. That was the part everyone actually needed answered before the markup.
^ exactly. jason smith had months to draft this and the staking question is still TBD. every accountant i know is dreading this markup
A 114 page package and still nothing settled on mining and staking taxation. Six years of hearings and the hardest question gets deferred again.
its even weirder when you notice hr 10357 pulls from a democrat and republican bill both. if anything can survive the markup its probably this combo
the bipartisan combo helps in the House but the Senate cloture math on the Clarity Act today is the real signal. if that stalls, this markup is theater