Legislation

Senate Blocks Crypto Market Bill

Is the CLARITY Act a gift to crypto insiders posing as regulation or Congress' rare chance to write the rules for a new market?

20 hours ago·Updated 17 hours ago

Story

Above: A Zcash logo is displayed on a smartphone with a Bitcoin logo in the background. Image credit: Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

The Spin

Narrative A

The CLARITY Act is a gift to crypto insiders, sold as regulation. Its ethics provisions are so porous that a president who already pulled in $1.4 billion from crypto in 2025 keeps every dollar, while loopholes let officials own token firms outright. Self-certification hands fraudsters the keys and dumps the work on a gutted CFTC that has lost a fifth of its staff.

Chris Van Hollen on X Columbia Law School

Narrative B

This bill hits all seven pillars Senate Democrats themselves laid out, plus 126 substantive changes they requested, a historic ethics framework and enforcement power for state attorneys general. Killing it doesn't stop corruption, it just leaves crypto governed by agency rules any future administration can erase. Congress rarely gets to write the rules for a new market from scratch.

Faryar Shirzad on X CoinDesk