Clarity Act stalls as SEC, Fed build crypto rules anyway
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- The Clarity Act missed its procedural Senate vote before the summer recess, leaving only a limited September window or the year-end lame duck session to advance the crypto market-structure bill.
- The SEC is preparing two crypto moves — a tokenized-securities sandbox long in the works and a "regulation crypto" rule easing fundraising and oversight — even as Chair Paul Atkins insists only Congress can deliver "future-proofed" authority.
- The Federal Reserve is building tailored crypto-firm access to its payments rails while banking regulators rapidly issue charters that "will have some durability" beyond changes at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
- Miles Jennings, a16z crypto's head of policy, said the banking lobby's drive to force stablecoin-rewards bans into Clarity is "accelerating their own obsolescence," since last year's GENIUS Act already governs such rewards.
- Institutional investors remain hesitant to enter crypto "on uncertain legal footing," and a Democratic House takeover next year would repopulate agency chairs and overturn the guidance-based policies underpinning that framework.
- The legislative track record shows FIT21 passed the House in 2024 and the Clarity Act itself passed the House in 2025 before stalling in the Senate, suggesting the market-structure bill will re-emerge.
Why it matters: Without the Clarity Act, the crypto industry's regulatory foundation rests on agency guidance that future administrations would more easily reverse than statute — a risk already keeping institutional capital on the sidelines. The banking lobby's stablecoin-rewards fight may have killed the bill while leaving last year's GENIUS Act intact, giving crypto more competitive latitude than the banks intended.
