Hello and welcome to the Punch Bowl News Reback podcast.

I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen.

And today I'm joined by Brendan Peterson, our financial services expert, someone we lovably

called Dr. Vault here at Punch Bowl.

And it's been an incredibly busy week on the

financial services beat from crypto to Powell to everything in between. Brendan, hope you're

hanging in there. I'm okay. It's been a very long week. We're recording this on Thursday, and we were supposed to have a banking markup today of this landmark crypto bill. And I literally told Jasper Goodman, another reporter at Politico, covers this beat this morning. I was like, my body was zero percent ready for this markup, which is good because the markup was canceled.

So we're doing okay.

Great segue into the first question, which is what on earth happened with the market structure

bill that was going to be marked up in front of the Senate Banking Committee.

We talked about this earlier today at House votes.

It brought together some powerful interests, the banking industry, the cryptocurrency industry,

and of course, senators at the center of all of it. Just to start off with, explain what this

bill would have done and why it all fell apart this week. Yeah. So market structure is a term we use for this bill that is a sweeping piece of legislation.

It will change the shape of the financial system to incorporate crypto and other types of digital assets.

Very, very big deal.

It is going into the plumbing of the financial system between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and is going to make big changes to laws that have been on the books for the better part of 100 years. And it's a major priority for crypto. This is the crown jewel of their legislative agenda, which they have been pushing for very, very hard for several years now.

But they parked massive amounts of campaign financing dollars behind in the 2024 election to bring us to this moment.

Where in 2026, lawmakers are trying to make good on this agenda.

There's bipartisan interest here.

There is Democrats and Republicans who want to basically good on this agenda. There's bipartisan interest here. There is Democrats and

Republicans who want to basically create the regulatory framework that crypto is asking for, which

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