S2284

**What happened:** S.2284 — the Keep Your Coins Act of 2025 — was introduced in the Senate on July 15, 2025, by Senator Ted Budd (R-NC) with cosponsors Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). It was immediately referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. An identical companion bill (HR148) was introduced in the House and referred to the Financial Services Committee. The bill is in early stages with 2 cosponsors, no hearings scheduled, and no markup history. **What the bill actually does:** The bill text explicitly prohibits any federal agency head from restricting a 'covered user' (any person obtaining convertible virtual currency for their own use) from: (1) using convertible virtual currency to purchase goods/services for their own use, and (2) self-custodying digital assets using a self-hosted wallet for any lawful purpose. This directly targets rules proposed or considered by FinCEN (under the Bank Secrecy Act), Treasury, and the SEC regarding recordkeeping requirements for self-hosted wallet transfers or bans on certain self-custody arrangements. **The money trail — authorization vs appropriation:** The bill authorizes $0 in federal spending. It is a deregulation/rights-restoration bill — it removes a regulatory burden rather than appropriating funds. The economic impact is entirely through protecting existing market structures (retail crypto exchanges, corporate BTC treasuries, mining operations) from future regulatory action. The value at stake is the entire US self-custody crypto ecosystem — estimated by CoinMetrics to encompass hundreds of billions in asset value and tens of billions in annual transaction volume. **Structural winners and losers:** Winners are pure-play crypto companies whose revenue models depend on self-custody and peer-to-peer trading: Coinbase (retail exchange fees), MicroStrategy (BTC treasury thesis), Riot Platforms and CleanSpark (BTC miner self-custody and liquidity operations). Winners also include hardware wallet manufacturers (Ledger, Trezor — both private) and DeFi protocols structurally dependent on self-hosted wallets. Losers are incumbent financial institutions that benefit from regulatory barriers to self-custody: banks with digital asset custody divisions (BNY Mellon, State Street) that would face more competition from non-custodial alternatives. **Presidential executive action context:** The April 20, 2026 Presidential Determination under the Defense Production Act for energy infrastructure is not directly relevant to this bill. However, the combined context is a federal government actively encouraging energy infrastructure buildout (benefiting bitcoin miners as large energy consumers) while this bill protects miners' ability to self-custody and transact their mined coins — a complementary regulatory environment for the mining sector. **Timeline:** As an early-stage bill in the 119th Congress (through Jan 2027), this bill requires: committee hearings, markup, floor vote in the Senate, House passage of companion HR148, conference committee (if needed), and presidential signature. With 2 cosponsors outside leadership, passage probability in this Congress is low (~15-25%) but the bill's reintroduction in subsequent Congresses is likely as crypto regulation remains a live issue. The bill establishes a marker for the regulatory debate that will inform market expectations even if the bill stalls.