Pass Clarity
Senate Majority Leader Thune told reporters yesterday that the CLARITY Act probably won't get a Senate vote before the August recess.
Before "probably" hardens into "next Congress," a reminder of what the status quo actually is.
US crypto regulation is a road where the speed limit is printed on the ticket. You find out what the rule was when the penalty arrives, drafted by the enforcement division, years after you built the thing.
You can't comply with a speed limit that only exists on the ticket, especially when the cop at the speed trap changes every 4 years.
I've worked on crypto deals under this status quo for years. Here's where you end up in almost every conversation:
Legal opinions nobody will sign, because the honest answer to "is this asset a security" is a probability range, not a yes or no. Clients pay for certainty but get a memo full of hedges instead.
Offshore structuring as default hygiene. The Cayman foundations & BVI issuers in these deals aren't just tax plays (but, to be clear, the tax play doesn't hurt). They exist in no small part because the US wouldn't say which agency owns the asset (and both reserved the right to decide it later), or if they were regulated at all.
Diligence that dies on "we can't get comfortable with the regulatory posture." Nobody was protected when those deals fell apart. Except maybe the lawyers, because we tend to get paid either way.
And here's the worst one: the enforcement was always filed in the name of investor protection, but when the complaint hit, the token price got hit with it. The team had money, lawyers and usually months of warning. Retail investors found out from the headline and held onto that falling knife all the way to the floor. The ticket was written to the project, but the fine landed on the passengers.
CLARITY posts the speed limit sign. It draws a statutory line between digital commodities (CFTC) & securities (SEC), gives trading platforms an actual registration path and sets real custody requirements, with disclosure obligations for them all.
This isn't deregulation. Every serious project I've worked with would take MORE compliance obligations in exchange for knowing what they are in advance. That's the whole trade.
Is the bill perfect? No 60-vote bill ever is. But the alternative on offer isn't a better bill. It's another Congress of writing the speed limit on the ticket after you're pulled over.
The Senate has about two weeks left. Every market structure framework since 2022 has died the same way: waiting on a better version that never came.
Pass it.