House flips to Democrats, putting French Hill's crypto gavel on the line

As of Wednesday afternoon, House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill is deadlocked in his Arkansas reelection race against Democratic candidate Chris Jones, according to the Associated Press, with 99% of votes reported. Hill was clinging to a slim lead. Meanwhile, Democrats have flipped control of the House, which means a new cast of committee leaders will decide what happens to crypto bills next.

Hill has run the Financial Services Committee for two years, a stretch that produced the first federal stablecoin framework and a sprawling crypto market-structure bill. That bigger bill died in the Senate in September. Crypto political action committee Fairshake and other PACs poured $1 million into Hill's campaign, per the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Plenty of crypto-friendly lawmakers did hold on, including Reps. Josh Gottheimer, Warren Davidson, Ritchie Torres and House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson. But Rep. Bill Huizenga, seen as friendly to the industry, lost his Michigan seat to Democrat Sean McCann, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. In Alabama, Shomari Figures beat Republican Rhett Marques; Figures had the backing of advocacy group Stand With Crypto.

With the gavel switching parties, Hill is expected to slide into the top Republican spot on Financial Services rather than run it. Top Democrat Maxine Waters is expected to take back the chair, though she is facing challenges from Reps. Sean Casten and Bill Foster, with some Democrats pushing for generational change. Politico reported last month that the push comes as Waters, 88, weighs another stint against Casten, 54.

Waters isn't a stranger to crypto rulemaking. She worked on the stablecoin framework known as the GENIUS Act and has signaled an openness to writing rules for the industry. She has also hammered crypto after the collapse of exchange FTX, and more recently over President Donald Trump's crypto interests and how they might bend regulation.

The upshot: the committee that wrote Washington's first real crypto rules is about to change hands, and the bills that stalled in September now face a very different audience.