Crypto Turns to Regulators After Senate Kills Clarity Act — SkimNews
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- The Senate voted 49-50 against advancing the Clarity Act, falling short of the 60 votes needed, with three Republicans joining Democrats; Sen. Cynthia Lummis called the bill all but dead for the year after ethics provisions tied to President Trump's crypto ventures stalled negotiations.
- SEC Chairman Paul Atkins unveiled an "innovation exemption" letting qualifying venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks on-chain without registering as national securities exchanges, directly framing the move around the Clarity Act's failure.
- The CFTC issued no-action relief letting passive software providers—including crypto wallet apps—offer users access to regulated derivatives without registering as introducing brokers, and separately sent a broader crypto-markets rulemaking to the White House for review.
- The Federal Reserve proposed rules requiring stablecoin issuers under its oversight to fully back tokens with safe, liquid assets and hold capital against operational risks, fulfilling its piece of the multi-agency rollout of the GENIUS Act Trump signed in 2025.
- The OCC is racing to finalize its own stablecoin rules by November, ahead of a January statutory deadline.
- Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith said the sector is "now looking to regulators for guidance," calling it "the more viable path forward right now."
- Agency rulemaking is slower to write, easier to challenge in court, and easier for a future administration to unwind than a statute—a vulnerability the industry now accepts after years of fearing an SEC "regulation by enforcement" campaign under former Chair Gary Gensler.
Why it matters: The crypto industry traded congressional certainty for regulatory speed: within 48 hours of the Clarity Act's 49-50 defeat, the SEC, CFTC, and Fed each delivered rulemakings. But the article explicitly notes agency rules are easier to challenge in court and easier for a future administration to unwind than a law—leaving the industry's legal protections more fragile than the market-structure statute would have provided.
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