The House Small Business Subcommittee on Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Workforce Development held a hearing titled “Main Street Meets Crypto” on September 15, 2026, to examine whether digital assets can cut what small firms pay to move money. Chairman Brian Jack (R-GA) framed the session around transaction costs, payment speed, and access to capital rather than around investing in tokens.
For anyone running a one-person business, the relevant question is narrower than the headlines suggest. Card processing and platform fees come off the top of every job, and a hearing about shaving those percentages is a hearing about take-home pay.
What The Hearing Actually Covered
Jack convened the panel while the Senate weighs the Clarity Act, the digital asset market structure bill that would settle which federal agency regulates what. He described the session as bipartisan and focused on lowering costs, reducing payment friction, and putting emerging technology to work for businesses outside the coastal tech corridors.
Witnesses included Faryar Shirzad, whose family ran restaurants, and Ben Leventhal of Blackbird, a company that builds blockchain tools for restaurants. Both testified about thin-margin service businesses rather than about speculative trading.
Why This Matters For Self-Employed Owners
Shirzad put the math in terms any solo operator recognizes. Asked whether removing intermediary layers means lower costs, faster access to money, or better cash flow, he answered that it means all three, and said that for a business where “the margins are always extraordinarily thin,” saving one or two percent on payment costs “is a transformational moment.”
That framing matters because freelancers and microbusiness owners absorb payment friction in two places at once. They pay a processing cut on the way in, and they wait days for settlement, which is its own cost when an invoice is covering rent.
Leventhal made the second point that independents should notice. Asked how blockchain tools can help a small business build customer loyalty without the owner becoming a technology expert, he said the job of the technology company is to do the hard work “so small businesses don’t have to become particularly sophisticated in the weeds of the technology.”
What Self-Employed Readers Should Do Next
Start by measuring what you already pay. Add up a full quarter of processing fees, platform commissions, transfer charges, and currency conversion costs, then express it as a percentage of revenue. Most solo operators have never run that number, and it is the only baseline against which any new payment rail can be judged.
Then treat this as a watching brief, not a buying signal. Nothing decided at this hearing changes what you can accept from clients tomorrow, and the regulatory clarity witnesses asked Congress to provide does not yet exist. Owners who want lower fees today have more immediate options, including negotiating processor rates, invoicing by ACH instead of card, and auditing recurring platform charges that crept up without notice.
If you do experiment, keep it small and keep records. Accepting payment in a digital asset creates a taxable event and a basis-tracking obligation that a shoebox of receipts will not survive, so the bookkeeping cost can erase the fee savings for a business running on thin volume.
What To Watch Next
The Clarity Act in the Senate is the piece that determines whether any of this reaches ordinary businesses. Until market structure rules are settled, most payment processors will not offer stablecoin settlement to small merchants at scale, and the community banks that serve independents will stay on the sidelines.
Watch also for whether the committee turns this hearing into legislation. The same panel has spent 2026 working through technology questions for small firms, including a July hearing on artificial intelligence, and it held a full committee markup the following morning. Independents tracking federal policy should pair this with the ongoing fight over worker classification rules, which has a far more direct effect on how solo workers get paid and taxed.
