When he missed some work recently, as he stood in as Speaker, the crypto bills he'd been relentlessly herding through the U.S. House of Representatives totally stalled.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2023. For the full list, click here.

Now, the tenacious congressman, back from his speaker stint, has reignited his charge for House votes on the bills that would regulate U.S. stablecoin issuers and build comprehensive oversight of the crypto markets. The bowtied chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has made that his mission after having already raised the two bills to unprecedented levels, getting his committee to pass them with bipartisan votes – despite opposition from the panel's senior Democrat.

Pragmatic McHenry is known for his willingness to deal with the other party. For months last year and earlier this year, he negotiated the stablecoin bill with his committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and nearly reached a deal before – as he contended – the Biden administration throttled the compromise.

While the next leap for the bills has probably been delayed into 2024, they have a good chance of winning the House's approval, and they'd be the first significant industry legislation to do so. That said, McHenry would then have to get his Senate counterparts – so far showing little interest – to embrace the effort. The odds are long, but nobody in Congress has matched McHenry's persistence on crypto legislation.

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Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.