US House approves the FIT21 crypto bill

The United States House of Representatives approved the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act on May 22, 2024. The FIT21 bill obtained 279 favorable votes and 136 against, with support from members of both parties. It was the first major crypto market structure text to pass a House vote, but it was not yet law.

How he distributed powers

FIT21 sought to define when a digital asset should be treated as a commodity under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and when it fell under the SEC’s securities regime. The degree of decentralization of the network and the form of asset distribution played a central role in the transition between both frameworks.

The text created registration channels for exchanges, brokers and dealers of digital assets. It also included rules on custody, segregation of funds, disclosure, conflicts and client protection. The aim was to replace some of the uncertainty based on individual actions with written obligations for intermediaries.

The CFTC would have been given authority over spot markets for certain digital commodities. The SEC would retain powers over assets and operations that fit as securities. That distribution did not eliminate all gray areas, but it provided a procedure for resolving qualification and monitoring platforms.

Cross-cutting support and objections

The endorsement of 71 Democrats showed that the issue did not follow a perfect partisan divide. Proponents argued that the United States needed market rules comparable to other financial centers and that case-by-case application did not offer sufficient certainty to businesses and consumers.

Critics warned that the definition of decentralization could allow issuers to escape the securities regime too soon. They also questioned the CFTC’s resources and the risk of creating a less demanding framework for economically similar products. The White House expressed objections, although it did not announce a categorical veto at the time.

The vote only resolved passage through one chamber. To become law, the Senate had to approve the same text or negotiate another, and the president had to sign it. Presenting FIT21 as a regulation in force in May 2024 would have confused political impulse with legal effect.

What happened to the project

The Senate received H.R. 4763 in September 2024 and referred it to its Committee on Banking, but did not complete its approval during the 118th Congress. At the end of that legislature, the project stopped moving forward. His concepts, however, influenced later initiatives on market structure.

This legislative cycle is normal in the United States. A project can generate consensus, technical language and voting precedents without being enacted. These results serve as the basis for a new number and text in the following Congress, but they do not keep the previous project legally alive.

It is also important to separate the token classification from the intermediary license. Even if an asset could be treated as a digital commodity, the exchange offering it would still be subject to registration, custody, disputes, fraud prevention and other obligations. FIT21 did not propose an unsupervised market, but rather a different distribution of authorities and procedures.

Outlook from 2026

From August 2026, FIT21 should be read as legislative precedent, not the applicable law. The agenda continued through subsequent proposals, including versions of the CLARITY Act, with new boundary negotiations between the SEC and CFTC. The 2024 result demonstrated significant support without closing the debate.

For companies, the lesson is not to design compliance exclusively on a project. It is advisable to follow its content to anticipate political direction, but current decisions must be supported by current regulations, licenses and jurisprudence. For the newspaper archive, preserving the exact phase avoids attributing effects that Congress never approved.