Chris Land: Staff director, Senate Banking subcommittee on digital assets

Chris Land’s journey to becoming the lead negotiator on a major Senate cryptocurrency bill started far from the halls of Congress.

Land, who serves as the staff director for the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Digital Assets, was working in the Wyoming Legislature after law school, not planning to work on crypto, when the issue fell into his lap.

“I was the only person in the Wyoming Legislature that knew what Bitcoin was in 2017,” he quipped.

As a staff attorney in the state Legislature, Land had a hand in drafting Wyoming’s early crypto and digital asset laws, which he said gave him a “big head start on a lot of the issues Congress was going to consider over the last few years.”

He joined Sen. Cynthia Lummis’s (R-Wyo.) office in 2021, serving as general counsel and later staff director when the senator was tapped to chair the digital assets subcommittee in 2025.

Crypto has become a priority during the second Trump administration, with two pieces of legislation dominating the conversation.

The GENIUS Act, which created a regulatory framework for dollar-backed digital tokens known as stablecoins, cleared Congress and was signed into law by President Trump last year. The Clarity Act, which seeks to develop rules for the rest of the market, remains under negotiation in the Senate.

Land described the process of hashing out the bills as a “daily grind” and an “adventure” involving dozens of late nights, calls on Christmas Eve and his birthday, and thousands of hours of staff time.

“We’ve kind of been in fire drill mode for the last year, more or less, on trying to get these bills through,” he said.

When the Clarity Act ultimately advanced out of the Senate Banking panel earlier this year — after a markup cancellation and a months-long fight between the banking and crypto industries — both Lummis and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) praised Land’s work.

“I can’t say enough about your dedication to this,” Lummis said at the May markup. “As I’ve said to Chris many times, we’re the dogs that caught the tire.”

Tillis joked at the time that Lummis and her staff deserved a “long weekend,” adding, “They all do, and especially Chris.”

“Staff are supposed to be anonymous most of the time,” Land told The Hill, adding, “But it really meant a lot to me. It was an unforgettable memory that I’ll treasure for my entire life.”