Congress needs to "take the next step" by approving the crypto market structure legislation, President Donald Trump said during a Wednesday White House event with technology CEOs that was heavy with crypto names.

The president — flanked by crypto business leaders from Coinbase, Gemini, Ripple, Chainlink Labs and others — called for "a fair version" of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act at the gathering, hinting at the continued debate over the language of that "very bipartisan" bill that's been stuck in the U.S. Senate.

"It's a very, very powerful structured legislation which will keep us ahead of China, keep us ahead of everyone else," Trump said. "We'll open the door to the next wave of innovations and innovators."

Trump hosted the event in advance of the new Innovation Advisory Committee meeting for the first time at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Thursday. The committee includes a deep roster of crypto executives, also including the chief executives of such companies as Kraken, Anchorage Digital, Grayscale and OKX, in addition to prominent leaders from the prediction markets platforms and artificial intelligence companies.

The president has been at the center of his administration's crypto initiatives, which have begun to bear fruit as the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed its first major crypto rule this week and the Treasury Department proposed its approach to stablecoins. However, Trump is also at the center of a clash over government ethics in the Senate's Clarity Act, in which Democratic negotiators have been seeking to impose ethics limits on his crypto involvement — and by extension, the personal business ties of many other senior officials across all three branches of government.

The Clarity Act faces a final Senate window next month before another recess that will take Congress all the way to the November elections. It's set up for final voting, but the effort hasn't yet faced a test to show whether the bill can earn the 60 votes it needs for Senate passage.

"This would make all of the progress that this administration has made durable into the future, so it could survive for decades and decades to come," Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said of the Clarity Act, which he said reflects "a true bipartisan compromise."

"If we all come together, I think we can get this bill over the finish line," Armstrong said.