State-of-Crypto: Idaho Regulates Crypto Without a Digital Asset Law

Idaho has never passed a law that sets out how digital assets should be regulated. It has considered two and rejected both. What it has instead is three older instruments doing the work. That puts it in the larger group this series has been walking through in the state-by-state record of digital asset law.

The money transmitter act is the front door

The Idaho Department of Finance applies the state’s Money Transmitters Act, Idaho Code § 26-2901 et seq., to anyone exchanging virtual currency for government-issued money. Its own guidance is unambiguous: a business that accepts fiat “for later delivery to a third party in association with the purchase of a virtual currency” must hold a money transmitter license from the department.

The department’s list of who does not need that license runs to banks, credit unions, the Postal Service and government entities. There is no crypto carve-out on it.

Source: Idaho Department of Finance, Money Transmitters. https://www.finance.idaho.gov/securities-bureau/money-transmitters/ (page last modified 2025-07-09)

The UCC chapter Idaho wrote for itself

In 2022 the legislature added a “Digital Assets” chapter to Idaho’s commercial code, Idaho Code §§ 28-5301 to 28-5306, through House Bill 583. It passed the House 63-4-3 and the Senate 34-0-1 and took effect on 1 July 2022.

The operative sentence is short:

“Virtual currency is intangible personal property and is not a security, notwithstanding section 30-14-102, Idaho Code.” Idaho Code § 28-5304(3)

What makes this worth reporting is what Idaho did not do. The Uniform Law Commission’s answer to the same problem is UCC Article 12 and its “controllable electronic records”. Idaho did not adopt it. Chapters 13 and 14 of Title 28 are marked reserved and empty, and the state’s bespoke Chapter 53 never uses the uniform term. Idaho solved the control-and-perfection question with its own statute rather than the national model.

Sources: https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2022/legislation/h0583/ and https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title28/T28CH53/SECT28-5304/

Two bills, both dead

House Bill 585 (2024) would have protected the right to mine, store and transfer digital assets, exempted digital assets used as payment from taxation, and excluded a central bank digital currency from the state’s definition of money. Representatives Elaine Price and Dustin Manwaring sponsored it. It failed on the House floor, 30 to 40.

House Bill 586 (2026), the Financial Accountability Stablecoin Transaction Act, was introduced on 4 February 2026 and referred to the House Business Committee the following day. Nothing further is recorded against it. Idaho’s 2026 regular session adjourned sine die on 2 April, so the bill died there.

No bill proposing an Idaho strategic bitcoin reserve has ever been introduced.

Sources: https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2024/legislation/h0585/ and https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2026/legislation/h0586/

Mining is a tariff question, not a legal one

Idaho manages crypto mining’s demand on the grid through the Public Utilities Commission rather than through statute. Idaho Power opened Case No. IPC-E-21-37 in November 2021 to create Schedule 20, a rate class for “speculative high-density load customers”, meaning large mining operations. The schedule carries mandatory interruption of up to 225 hours a year across the summer peak.

The commission approved it, then partly reconsidered: in Order No. 35550 it found the record could not support making those interruptions uncompensated, and told Idaho Power to propose a compensation rate. The utility came back in Case No. IPC-E-22-30 proposing 7.34 cents per kilowatt hour for large general service and 8.35 cents for large power service.

Source, read in full: Order No. 35666, service date 18 January 2023

The part nobody writes about

Idaho keeps a published list of digital asset custodians it has authorized to hold crypto for Idahoans under the Idaho Trust Institutions Act. There are four names on it: NYDIG Trust Company, Gemini Trust, Standard Custody & Trust, and PayPal Digital.

None of them is an Idaho charter. The department supervises them jointly with their home states, and its own securities bureau covers their money transmission separately.

That is a reciprocity model, and it is the clearest statement of Idaho’s whole approach. Rather than build a crypto trust regime, the state recognizes charters granted elsewhere and supervises the edges. The page was last modified on 6 March 2026, so it is maintained rather than abandoned.

Source: https://www.finance.idaho.gov/financial-institutions-bureau/digital-asset-custodians/

Enforcement is borrowed too

Idaho’s public crypto enforcement record consists of three multistate settlements it joined, not actions it originated. A sweep of the department’s own administrative actions archive turns up no solo Idaho crypto case.

A trap for anyone checking these: the department’s press-release pages all display “August 27, 2025”, an artifact of a site migration. The real dates are on the PDFs’ own letterhead and are the ones used above.

What it adds up to

Idaho has done relatively little dedicated crypto lawmaking, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the reporting. Two purpose-built bills failed. The state instead stretched three older frameworks over the industry: a money transmitter act from 2003, a utility rate schedule, and a trust reciprocity list. It is a coherent position, and it is close to the opposite of the comprehensive-framework approach the states that get written about have taken.

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