The nation's top market regulators may be busy on crypto, but they cannot finish the job without Congress. That was the message from Rep. French Hill, who argued this week that the flurry of crypto rulemaking from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is no substitute for the market-structure legislation that stalled in the Senate.

Speaking Wednesday in an interview with Fox Business, Hill, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, credited the two agencies for stepping into the vacuum left by congressional inaction. He noted SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Mike Selig "have taken steps to use their regulatory power, their exemptive relief, to give definition to digital assets and digital commodities, so we can have a functional system here in the U.S. for this innovative form of finance."

But Hill was blunt about the limits of that approach. "In my judgement, these regulatory policies fall short of what we have to do, which is have a legislative solution," he said, pointing to his own authorship of the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which passed the House in the previous Congress before stalling in the Senate, and the Clarity Act in the current one.

He said he still holds out hope that the Clarity Act can pass during the lame-duck session, the post-election window before the new Congress is seated in January, arguing, "We need that permanent law change to make sure America is number one in digital assets and blockchain technology."

Hill's comments cut against a narrative that has taken hold since the Clarity Act's collapse. The bill would have set the rules of the road for the majority of cryptocurrency activity in the United States and cleared up the jurisdictional lines between the CFTC and the SEC over digital assets — a boundary that matters because the SEC polices securities markets while the CFTC oversees commodities and futures. But the Senate failed to advance the bill in a 49-50 vote last month, prompting the SEC and CFTC to press ahead with their own initiatives and leading many in the industry to conclude that crypto had stopped waiting on Congress and learned to lean on the regulators instead.

Those agency moves have come fast. The SEC rolled out an "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks and proposed new rules for how investment advisers and funds can custody crypto. The CFTC, for its part, sent crypto-markets rulemakings to the White House, where proposals typically undergo administrative review before publication and public comment, and floated a plan to bring crypto exchanges under federal oversight. Together, the steps amount to the only form of "clarity" that regulators can offer crypto in Congress's absence.

Hill's point is that such relief is inherently fragile. Exemptions and guidance can be challenged in court or unwound by a future administration, whereas a statute is durable. A longtime crypto advocate who was tapped to lead the committee precisely because of his digital-asset focus, Hill has consistently framed legislation as the industry's only path to lasting certainty.

The lame-duck window he is banking on is narrow. Whether a bill that could not clear the Senate weeks ago can be revived before year's end remains an open question, with the key signal being whether Senate leaders schedule floor time for market structure before the new Congress convenes. For now, though, Hill is not ready to hand the job to the regulators.