What to know:

  Enough U.S. Senate Democrats are still showing they're ready to approve a crypto market structure bill that the effort has legs, they expressed in a meeting with several crypto CEOs on Wednesday that focused on a way forward on U.S. crypto regulation.  

Digital assets business leaders had two meetings set for the same day, the first to discuss the next steps with Democrats, whose votes will be needed to lift any bill over the Senate's 60-vote threshold. The second meeting was with those lawmakers' Republican counterparts, who've been pushing a draft bill that's their answer to the House of Representatives' Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

"It's clear there's a sufficient level of Democratic support," said Chainlink CEO and co-founder Sergey Nazarov, in a statement to CoinDesk between the meetings. He said more than 10 lawmakers attended, "all very committed to investing their time and effort in making the bill a success."

Tension has been rising between the parties and within crypto circles as the chances for Senate bandwidth grow slimmer for 2025. When some Democratic legislative proposals on decentralized finance (DeFi) recently leaked, many in the industry considered the ideas a fatal stroke to market structure negotiations. Some of them made those views public.

The Democrat meeting featured some harsh language over that tension, participants said, but the policy gaps probably aren't insurmountable.

"I think that friction is transitory and will resolve soon," Nazarov said.

Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, told CoinDesk in an interview that the meetings have "reset the conversation," but she said "we've got our work cut out for us" when it comes to getting the lawmakers' knowledge level up to where it needs to be to write the legislation.

The meeting between the industry leaders and Democratic lawmakers was said to be spearheaded by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat who has been advocating for tailored crypto regulations for years. The Democrats showed a high interest in addressing illicit finance concerns in the legislation, Nazarov said.

After the Republican meeting, a spokesman of Senator Tim Scott, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, issued a statement that Scott "calls on Democratic colleagues to immediately return to the negotiating table, engage in serious bipartisan discussions and offer substantive feedback on our bill."