Senate sent the DeFi broker-rule repeal toward the White House

On March 26, 2025, the U.S. Senate passed H.J.Res. 25 by 70 votes to 28, completing congressional approval of a resolution aimed at nullifying the Internal Revenue Service’s reporting rule for certain decentralized-finance trading interfaces. The Senate’s official roll call records the vote as No. 151; two senators did not vote.

The action was consequential but not yet a repeal. The House had passed the same resolution on March 11 by 292 votes to 132, with one member voting present. After the Senate approved it without amendment on March 26, the measure still had to be enrolled, presented to the president and enacted. The IRS rule therefore remained legally in place at the close of March 26.

What Congress targeted

Treasury and the IRS published the final rule on December 30, 2024. It became effective on February 28, 2025, while its principal reporting provisions for covered DeFi sales were scheduled to apply to digital-asset transactions occurring on or after January 1, 2027.

The regulation treated providers of “trading front-end services” as brokers when they regularly provided services effectuating digital-asset sales and met the rule’s knowledge-related conditions. Covered brokers would have to file information returns and furnish statements reporting customers’ gross proceeds under the digital-asset reporting framework.

The scope was broader than custody but narrower than every piece of DeFi software. Treasury reasoned that a customer-facing website or application could help effect a transfer even when its operator did not control the user’s private keys. The final rule excluded decentralized autonomous organizations, governance-token holders and web-application operators solely by those labels; they were covered only when they also provided qualifying trading front-end services.

That boundary drove the policy dispute. Critics argued that noncustodial interfaces were not brokers in the conventional sense and would have to redesign products to identify users and collect reportable transaction data. Treasury and the IRS answered that the function performed—not the technology or custody model—should determine broker status, and that front-end providers had the closest customer relationship in the DeFi stack.

Why the March 26 vote mattered

The 70–28 tally demonstrated that resistance to the rule extended beyond a narrow party-line majority. It also moved a crypto-industry compliance dispute through both chambers of Congress, a materially different status from the Senate’s March 4 approval of a similar Senate resolution or the House’s March 11 vote.

H.J.Res. 25 used the Congressional Review Act. Under that statute, a disapproval resolution must pass both chambers and be enacted before the targeted rule loses force. Enactment would also restrict an agency from issuing a new rule in substantially the same form unless a subsequent law specifically authorized it. On March 26, those consequences were prospective, not accomplished.

The vote did not eliminate taxes on digital-asset gains, erase taxpayers’ obligation to report taxable transactions, or settle broader questions about securities, commodities or anti-money-laundering law. The IRS rule itself stated that it concerned federal tax reporting and did not determine status under those other regimes.

Later context

On April 10, 2025, President Donald Trump signed H.J.Res. 25 as Public Law 119-5. That subsequent enactment nullified the rule. It is included here only to close the legislative chronology; it does not change what was knowable when the Senate voted on March 26.