The House Ways and Means Committee is circulating seven draft bills on how digital assets get taxed, and a hearing is set for June 9, 2026 at 2

PM ET. It is the first serious move to write tax rules built for crypto rather than bolted onto rules made for stocks and property. None of it is law. The drafts are for discussion, the full text has not been released, and the hearing is where the haggling starts.

Committee Chairman Jason Smith announced the hearing on June 2. Splitting the work into seven separate drafts instead of one big bill is a deliberate choice: a lawmaker who balks at one provision can still back another, which makes it easier to build a coalition around the pieces most people agree on.

What the bills are trying to fix

Since 2014, the IRS has treated crypto as property. That single decision is the root of most of the pain. When you sell, swap, or spend property that has gained value, you owe capital gains tax on the gain. Applied to a currency people are meant to actually use, the result is absurd: buy a sandwich with Bitcoin that has risen a few cents since you got it, and you have technically triggered a reportable taxable event.

The drafts take aim at several of these friction points. Based on what the committee and outlets covering it have described, the package targets:

  • De minimis relief for small transactions. A threshold below which tiny crypto payments would not trigger capital gains reporting. This is the headline item for ordinary holders.
  • Stablecoin tax treatment. Stablecoins are designed to hold a 1
    peg to the dollar, so taxing tiny fluctuations in their value creates paperwork that raises almost no revenue.
  • Mining and staking rewards. The drafts reportedly include a deferral option for when these rewards become taxable. Today the IRS counts staking rewards as income the moment you receive them, even if you have sold nothing. Deferral would push that recognition to the point of sale.
  • Wash-sale rules. Stocks and bonds carry a wash-sale restriction: you cannot sell at a loss and immediately rebuy to bank the tax benefit. Crypto has sat in a gray area where that rule does not clearly apply. The drafts address whether that gap stays open or closes.
  • Charitable contributions. Donating crypto worth over $5,000 can currently require a qualified appraisal, which is clumsy for an asset with a live price on any exchange. The drafts would waive that.
  • Securities tax treatment and a voluntary disclosure program. The package also touches how securities tax rules integrate with digital assets, plus a path for taxpayers who ran into trouble with past crypto reporting.

The exact text behind each of these is not public. The committee's drafts "remain circulated internally for now," so the difference between, say, a $200 de minimis threshold and a $600 one is exactly the kind of detail the June 9 hearing exists to argue out.

What moved it

The double-taxation complaint has been building for a while. Senator Cynthia Lummis pushed proposals last year to address miners and stakers getting taxed twice, once as income when rewards land and again as capital gains when the assets sell. That language did not make it into the large tax-and-spending bill that passed last year, but the pressure did not stop.

That effort carried over into the House. Representatives Max Miller of Ohio and Steven Horsford of Nevada first drew up a bipartisan draft in December, then formally introduced it in May 2026 as the Digital Asset PARITY Act, a bill that would exempt small dollar-pegged stablecoin payments from capital gains, offer a deferral election on staking and mining rewards, extend wash-sale rules to crypto, and direct the IRS to study a de minimis exemption. The current seven-draft package reads as those scattered ideas broken into separate, votable pieces.

The scale of the paperwork problem is easy to underestimate. Kraken said it issued more than 56 million crypto tax forms to the IRS for 2025, and that three out of every four of those forms were for amounts under $50. A de minimis exemption would clear most of that reporting off the books.

Industry groups are engaged. The Crypto Council for Innovation and the Digital Chamber have both worked with the committee. Cody Carbone, who runs the Digital Chamber, called the hearing "a welcome opportunity to refine these proposals and keep the bipartisan tax effort moving forward."

How this fits with the CLARITY Act

The tax effort runs alongside a separate, bigger fight over market structure. The CLARITY Act is a different bill with a different job: it would split regulatory turf between the SEC and the CFTC, sorting which tokens are commodities and which are securities. It passed the House in July 2025 and sits in the Senate.

Its odds just got marked down. Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital, cut his estimate for CLARITY passing in 2026 from 75% to 60%. The reason is timing, not lost support: next week's Senate calendar is expected to be eaten by FISA-related business after a failed reauthorization vote, and two sticking points, lawmaker ethics rules and illicit-finance provisions, remain unresolved. A July 4 target that Lummis had floated for moving the bill now looks shaky. Thorn said he stays optimistic on the bill's eventual chances even with the lower number.

The two tracks are worth keeping straight. CLARITY decides who regulates what. The tax drafts decide what you owe when you swap, spend, stake, or mine.

What it doesn't tell you

These are discussion drafts headed into a hearing, not enacted law, and the full text is not public. Provisions can change, get cut, or stall, and the congressional calendar is tight ahead of the November midterms. The gap between a draft and a signed law is wide, and many crypto tax proposals have died in it before.

Treat every specific here as provisional. The thresholds, the deferral mechanics, whether wash-sale application ends up mandatory or optional, all of it is exactly what June 9 is meant to pin down. None of this is tax advice; your current obligations are unchanged until something actually passes.

What we're watching

The June 9 hearing first, and then whether any of the seven drafts move to a formal markup, the stage where the real numbers get written in. The de minimis threshold and the staking-reward timing rule are the two provisions that would change the most for ordinary holders, so those are the ones to track through markup. On the separate market-structure track, watch whether the Senate calendar opens up enough to give CLARITY a path before its informal July deadlines slip further.