Crypto's Landmark Clarity Act Faces Slim Odds as September Vote Approaches

The U.S. crypto industry enters September facing a pivotal reckoning: the market structure bill known as the Clarity Act is headed toward a procedural Senate vote on Sept. 15, and few inside the industry believe it will survive.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has scheduled the procedural vote after the Senate returned from its August recess, potentially clearing the way for a full floor vote. But the bill missed its earlier legislative window when the Senate adjourned for recess without acting on it, and optimism has since dimmed considerably among industry participants.

"I personally am a bit pessimistic about the Clarity Act being passed," John Darsie, CEO of SALT, told CNBC at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole in August. "Leading into the midterms, you don't often pass legislation of this magnitude."

The Clarity Act would establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets, divide oversight authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, create registration requirements, and strengthen anti-money-laundering protections.

Unresolved disputes are complicating the path forward. Stablecoin rewards and ethics provisions tied to President Donald Trump and his family's crypto interests remain sticking points. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, one of only two Democrats who voted to advance the bill out of the Senate Banking Committee, has been working on bipartisan compromise language around those ethics provisions.

"The way to get 60 votes is with good ethics legislation as well as rounding out some of the things that are still outstanding," Gallego said during a fireside chat at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium last month.

The bill's possible failure stands in sharp contrast to the scale of political spending that preceded it. Crypto-backed political groups spent more than $200 million during the 2024 election cycle, helping elect candidates friendly to the industry and elevating digital asset regulation as a mainstream policy issue.

That investment has yielded some returns even without legislation. The SEC and CFTC have adopted more accommodating postures toward crypto under the Trump administration, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has also moved toward a looser framework for digital assets. At a cryptocurrency summit in August, President Trump said the administration is focused on creating "a clear regulatory framework for pioneers and builders."

Industry leaders speaking at the Wyoming symposium argued that the sector can continue to develop even if Clarity fails, pointing to rulemaking by the SEC and CFTC as a partial substitute.

"We've already seen some contingency planning," said Sunayna Tuteja, former chief innovation officer at the Federal Reserve, pointing to discussions between the two agencies about what can be accomplished through rulemaking. "Not perfect, but progress nonetheless."

Denelle Dixon, president of the Stellar Development Foundation, urged the industry to use the next two years to solidify standards already emerging from the regulators — building a record durable enough to outlast a potential change in administration. "Whichever administration takes over, we have all of this bulletproof work that we've done to show not only is it successful, but it is advantageous for us to maintain this market structure," Dixon said.

Others warned that regulatory uncertainty without formal legislation discourages long-term capital deployment. "If you're looking to deploy capital and invest, and one [jurisdiction] has an established framework while another jurisdiction like the U.S. … may be subject to, every two to four years, rapid and extreme change — [it's] hard to allocate capital," said Andrew McCormick, head of institutional and market development at Chainlink Labs.

With the Sept. 15 procedural vote fast approaching and Republican and Democratic negotiators still seeking consensus, the weeks ahead will determine whether the most ambitious crypto legislation in U.S. history clears the Senate or is shelved until after the midterm elections.

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