Chris Land leads negotiations on Senate cryptocurrency bill

The person most responsible for shaping the Senate’s landmark crypto regulatory framework got into digital assets almost by accident. Chris Land, staff director for the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets, was a Wyoming legislative staffer who happened to be the only person in the building who understood Bitcoin when the state started drafting its first digital asset laws. Now he’s quarterbacking the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill that passed the Senate Banking Committee on May 15, 2026, with a 15-9 bipartisan vote and aims to draw clean jurisdictional lines between the SEC and CFTC on crypto oversight. The final draft, released on September 14, 2026, incorporated 126 substantive changes requested by Democratic senators. From Cheyenne to the Capitol Land’s path to becoming Washington’s most consequential crypto staffer traces back to 2017 and 2018, when Wyoming was quietly becoming one of the most forward-thinking states on digital asset regulation. During that period, Land contributed to the drafting of early state-level digital asset statutes, work that positioned Wyoming as a regulatory laboratory years before Congress got serious about the topic. His experti...