The Cryptocurrency Act of 2020, officially titled the "Crypto-Currency Act of 2020", was a US House of Representatives bill, H.R. 6154, that proposed sorting digital assets into three legal categories and naming a lead federal regulator for each. Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, introduced it on 9 March 2020 in the 116th Congress. It was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and the Committee on Agriculture.
The bill never advanced. It had no co-sponsors, saw no recorded committee action, and expired when the 116th Congress ended in January 2021. It is still cited as one of the first attempts in Congress to answer the question that dominated US Cryptocurrency Regulation for the next five years: which agency is in charge of which kind of token. Later proposals, such as the market-structure bills debated from 2022 onwards, took up the same idea of splitting oversight between securities, commodities and payments regulators.
The Cryptocurrency Act of 2020 in plain terms
Imagine a building with three different landlords, each responsible for one floor, but nobody has put up signs saying which floor is which. Tenants keep getting letters from all three. The bill was an attempt to paint the signs: this kind of token goes to the first floor, that kind to the second, and the rest to the third.
It said some tokens are like raw goods such as wheat or oil, some are like digital dollars, and some are like shares and bonds. Each group would get one main supervisor, and each supervisor would have to publish a plain list of the licences and registrations a business needs. The idea was to replace guesswork with a map.
Background
By 2020 US crypto firms faced overlapping claims. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had applied the Howey Test to token sales; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission treated bitcoin as a commodity for futures purposes; and FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) treated exchangers and administrators of virtual currency as money transmitters, while states ran their own licensing. Firms complained they could not tell where the Regulatory Perimeter lay. Gosar's short bill was a response to that uncertainty.
Key provisions
The bill defined three categories of Digital Assets, each resting on a blockchain or a decentralised cryptographic ledger:
- Crypto-commodities. Highly fungible goods or services, including derivatives, traded without regard to who produced them. Lead regulator: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which would require exchanges trading them to register.
- Crypto-currencies. Representations of US currency or synthetic derivatives, including a Stablecoin fully collateralised in a correspondent banking account and synthetic versions that rely on a Blockchain Oracle or a Smart Contract (SC). Lead regulators: the Treasury, acting through FinCEN, and the Comptroller of the Currency, with exchanges required to register with FinCEN.
- Crypto-securities. All debt and equity resting on a blockchain or decentralised ledger, with an exception for certain synthetic derivatives registered with the Treasury as a Money Services Business (MSB) and complying with Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), FinCEN and OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) requirements. Lead regulator: the SEC, which would also oversee synthetic stablecoins.
Other sections would have required:
- Public lists. Each lead regulator would publish, and keep current, every federal licence, certification or registration needed to create or trade the assets it oversees.
- Traceability. FinCEN would write rules requiring each crypto-currency to allow transactions and the people behind them to be traced, modelled on the reporting that produces a Currency Transaction Report (CTR) at banks.
- Reserve audits. FinCEN would audit each reserve-backed stablecoin to confirm it was fully backed by government currency, an early statutory version of what Proof of Reserves (PoR) tries to show.
- Change notices. If a hack, dilution or deliberate decision changed a stablecoin's category, its regulator would notify the issuer and the public.
Reception and status
Industry press welcomed the bill's aim of clarity, but it attracted no co-sponsors, and commentators described it as unlikely to move. The traceability requirement drew concern from privacy advocates, since a rule that every crypto-currency must allow users to be traced would sit awkwardly with privacy-focused coins and with self-hosted wallets. Lawyers also noted that defining every blockchain-based debt or equity instrument as a crypto-security largely restated existing securities law rather than answering the harder question of when a token sale is an investment contract.
The bill died at the end of the 116th Congress without any action beyond referral. Congressional records list it only as introduced.
Legacy and later legislation
The three-way split anticipated later efforts. Proposals from 2022 onward again sought to divide oversight between the SEC and the commodities regulator, and the House passed the FIT21 market-structure bill in May 2024 and the CLARITY Act in July 2025. Stablecoin rules, which the 2020 bill tied to FinCEN and the Comptroller, were eventually enacted separately in the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, which created a federal regime for reserve-backed payment stablecoins, the kind of Fiat-Pegged Cryptocurrency the 2020 bill had tried to cover. Outside the US, the EU's MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) took a similar categorise-then-license approach. The idea of mandatory traceability survives in today's Travel Rule obligations and in Blockchain Analytics used by exchanges and investigators.