Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
- Rep. Anna Eshoo urged Nancy Pelosi to change the crypto language in the infrastructure bill.
- The House of Representatives is assessing the bill, which covers crypto tax reporting requirements.
- Eshoo's letter is now a NFT, underscoring the crypto community's opposition to the new rules' scope.
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Rep. Anna Eshoo urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to change the cryptocurrency-tax language in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in a letter dated Thursday.
The bill was approved in the Senate on Tuesday, but without a compromise amendment that would have narrowed the definition of "broker" in specifying which companies must report crypto gains.
Eshoo said the bill placed new tax-reporting requirements on the crypto industry by broadening the definition. It includes miners, developers of wallets, and validators that would be unable to comply with the requirements, as they would not know who the buyers and sellers were due to the decentralized nature of crypto, she added.
"When the House takes up the Senate bill, I encourage you to amend the problematic broker definition in section 80603 of the legislation," Eshoo said in her letter, which she shared on Twitter this week.
Pelosi has said the House of Representatives won't take up the legislation for consideration until the Senate has approved a Democrat-backed $3.5 trillion spending plan, likely in the fall.
"I share the goals of the underlying provision to address tax evasion in the cryptocurrency market, but the House should amend it, as the bipartisan compromise amendment would have, to meet this goal without stifling innovation in a nascent industry by imposing unworkable regulations," Eshoo wrote.
Her comments echo loud criticism of the bill by crypto advocates, who have argued the tax-reporting requirement would hinder the development of the crypto industry. Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz and Charles Hoskinson, founder of the cardano cryptocurrency, are among those who have voiced concerns.
In a show of support by the crypto world, the letter by Eshoo has been turned into a non-fungible token offered on the OpenSea platform. NFTs are one-of-a-kind collectible digital tokens tied to real-world assets such as videos, art, and fashion. The NFT is owned by a user named "Duncan_1982," whose collection otherwise mainly covers "Bored Ape" items.