House voted to overturn the IRS DeFi broker rule

The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.J.Res. 25 on March 11, 2025, voting 292–132 to overturn an Internal Revenue Service rule that classified certain customer-facing decentralized-finance services as brokers for federal information-reporting purposes. One member voted present and seven did not vote.

The vote was a major congressional rejection of Treasury Decision 10021, but it did not repeal the rule on March 11. The House resolution still required Senate approval and the president’s signature before the rule could lose force. That distinction mattered because the regulation had already become effective on February 28, even though its principal reporting requirements for covered DeFi transactions were not scheduled to apply until sales occurring on or after January 1, 2027.

What the House targeted

Treasury and the IRS published Treasury Decision 10021 on December 30, 2024. It required covered brokers to file information returns and furnish customer statements reporting gross proceeds from specified digital-asset sales and exchanges.

The rule focused on providers of “trading front-end services”: interfaces that offered users a menu of transactions and translated their choices into coded trade instructions. A provider could be treated as a broker when it maintained enough control or influence over those services to determine whether, and to what extent, a digital-asset transfer generated gross proceeds.

That scope was broader than traditional custody, but it did not automatically classify every protocol participant as a broker. Treasury said decentralized autonomous organizations, governance-token holders and web-application operators were not covered solely because of those roles; they had to provide qualifying front-end services. The rule also treated software whose sole function was to let users control private keys differently from a customer-facing trading interface.

For DeFi businesses, the institutional question was therefore who, if anyone, should collect customer identity and transaction data when execution occurs through smart contracts and users retain their keys. Treasury argued that qualifying front ends had the closest relationship with customers and were positioned to report. Opponents argued that imposing securities-broker-style reporting on noncustodial software interfaces was operationally mismatched to how decentralized trading works.

A tax-reporting dispute, not a tax repeal

H.J.Res. 25 used the Congressional Review Act, an expedited process for disapproving recently issued agency rules. If enacted, the resolution would declare Treasury Decision 10021 to have no force or effect and constrain the agency from issuing another rule in substantially the same form without new congressional authorization. On March 11, those legal consequences remained prospective.

The House action did not eliminate federal taxes on digital-asset gains, forgive existing liabilities or remove every Form 1099-DA obligation. Treasury Decision 10000, finalized separately in July 2024, covered custodial trading platforms, certain hosted-wallet providers, digital-asset kiosks and other intermediaries. The March 11 resolution targeted the later rule for specified DeFi front ends, not the entire digital-asset broker-reporting regime.

The fiscal stakes were also contested. In a March 7 cost estimate, the Congressional Budget Office incorporated the Joint Committee on Taxation’s projection that enactment would reduce federal revenue by $4.5 billion over fiscal years 2025 through 2035. CBO attributed the estimate mainly to less third-party reporting and the possibility of greater misreporting of taxable cryptocurrency income. It also flagged substantial uncertainty in economic projections and taxpayer behavior. The $4.5 billion was a forecast over an 11-fiscal-year window, not an observed loss, market value or measure of DeFi activity.

Why March 11 mattered

The 292-vote House coalition showed that resistance to the rule extended beyond a narrow party-line challenge. It also moved a technical dispute over interface design, data collection and tax administration into the center of federal crypto policy. The vote created a credible path to repeal, but the rule remained legally in place at the close of March 11. No verified evidence in the cited record supports attributing a particular token-price move to the vote.

Later context

The Senate passed H.J.Res. 25 on March 26, 2025, and President Donald Trump approved it as Public Law 119-5 on April 10, 2025. Those later actions completed the repeal; they are included only to close the chronology and do not change the event-day status described above.