What happened
On 10 April 2025, H.J.Res. 25 was signed into law as Public Law 119-5, 139 Stat. 48. One sentence does the work: Congress disapproves the Treasury rule on gross proceeds reporting by brokers that regularly provide services effectuating digital asset sales, "(89 Fed. Reg. 106928 (December 30, 2024)), and such rule shall have no force or effect."
That rule is TD 10021, published on 30 December 2024, effective 28 February 2025 and applicable to sales on or after 1 January 2027. It reached one layer of decentralised finance: the "trading front-end service providers" a user clicks through, not the protocols and automated market makers beneath them, and not the validators and block builders that settle the trade.
The House passed it on 11 March 2025, 292 to 132 with one member voting present. The Senate passed it on 26 March, 70 to 28.
What it changes
The rule is void, and how it was voided matters more than that it was. This is a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, so 5 U.S.C. 801(b) sets what follows. Under 801(b)(1) the rule "shall not take effect (or continue)". Under 801(b)(2) it "may not be reissued in substantially the same form", and no substantially similar rule may be issued "unless ... specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the joint resolution".
An agency that repeals its own regulation can propose it again under the next administration. Treasury cannot. The bar sits in statute, and only Congress can lift it.
What it does not change
The statute is untouched: 26 U.S.C. 6045(c)(1)(D) still reads exactly as the Infrastructure Act wrote it in 2021, because a disapproval resolution voids a regulation, not a law. Nor does it change anybody's tax liability: gains on disposal were taxable before the rule and are taxable after it, self-reported whether or not a form arrives.
Custodial brokers still report, on Form 1099-DA: gross proceeds for sales effected on or after 1 January 2025, and basis for digital assets acquired after 2025 in an account where the broker provided custodial services, so for sales on or after 1 January 2026. Notices 2024-56 and 2024-57 apply. Section 6050I cash reporting and the FinCEN regime are untouched as well. Front ends are not permanently exempt either: 801(b)(2) blocks a substantially similar rule, not a law authorising one.
Context
The definition being argued over is four years old. Section 80603 of the Infrastructure Act added "any person who (for consideration) is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets" to the tax code's brokers, broad enough on its face to reach a miner or a node operator.
What narrows it is the paperwork, not the statute. An information return needs a name, a taxpayer identification number, an address, gross proceeds and a basis, and a party that holds no customer asset and knows no customer identity cannot produce one field of it. So Treasury drew the line at possession: TD 10000, published on 9 July 2024 and effective 9 September 2024, says at 89 FR 56493 that the regulations "apply only to digital asset industry participants that take possession of the digital assets being sold by their customers".
TD 10000 is usually read as excluding miners and validators. It does not. At 89 FR 56492 Treasury records that "the proposed new digital asset middleman rules that apply to non-custodial industry participants are not being finalized", and that the final regulations "also reserve on these exclusions". What says these parties are not brokers is a pair of examples at 26 CFR 1.6045-1(b)(2)(ix) and (x): a person "solely engaged in the business of validating distributed ledger transactions", and a seller of hardware or software whose only function is to let someone control private keys. Reserved, plus an example, is thinner cover than an exclusion.
TD 10021 tried to move the line from possession to knowledge: a front end knows the order even though it never holds the asset. It also promoted the validator carve-out into operative text, at 1.6045-1(a)(21)(iii)(C)(1). Congress has refused the second line and left the first standing. "Broker" tracks the ability to know a customer, not participation in the transaction, and a validator processes the sale usually without knowing it did.