News: 0185665912

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America's Cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act' Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying (msn.com)

(Wednesday September 16, 2026 @04:34AM (EditorDavid) from the seeking-Clarity dept.)


"The crypto industry's top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion," [1]reports Barron's .

> A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn't expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most crypto trading out of the purview of securities regulators, a key goal of firms like Coinbase Global...

>

> The vote is especially bitter for the crypto industry, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign expenditures over the past year to even get to this point. Crypto regulation doesn't even register among the issues voters care most about, and the industry has created massive political action committees to insert itself into the Washington agenda and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers who might oppose them... Democrats who voted against the bill said that it needed to do more to rein in [Trump's] crypto dealings to get their support. Some GOP lawmakers also voted against the motion after pressure from community bank executives. Bankers argued that the bill needed a stronger ban on high-yield crypto accounts to protect their deposits, a contention that crypto executives and the White House said was nonsense.

Concerns about the bill "intensified after President Trump [2]disclosed he and his family had earned $1.4 billion last year from his crypto ventures," [3]reports NPR . "The [4]massive bill — which stretches over 600 pages — would have established the first regulations for the crypto sector in U.S. history. But opponents saw it as the industry's attempt to encode into law a set of rules they saw as far too lenient on the industry, without enough safeguards."

A research note from an analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading predicts the bill is now likely tabled until at least 2030, [5] Barron's notes . But they also report what the crypto industry could do next:

> [C]rypto firms will be leaning heavily on Trump's regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Treasury Department, all of whom have said they plan to move swiftly to implement industry friendly rules if a bill didn't pass. The SEC has already dropped all major enforcement actions against crypto firms and has begun [6]to introduce rules that make it easier to raise money from crypto sales without running afoul of the law. The agency is also expected to implement rules making it easier to tokenize traditional assets like stocks.

>

> The friendly regulatory environment will in effect give the industry a little more than two years to sink roots into the traditional financial system and consumers' wallets. Even if the SEC took a harsh view of the industry in the future, as it did in President Joe Biden's administration, the agency at that point might find it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.



[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/clarity-act-collapses-in-blow-to-crypto-why-all-is-not-lost-for-digital-assets/ar-AA2cgDya

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/us/politics/trump-financial-disclosure-crypto-windfall.html

[3] https://www.npr.org/2026/09/15/nx-s1-5968711/clarity-act-crypto-senate-vote

[4] https://www.lummis.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/EHF26724.pdf

[5] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/clarity-act-collapses-in-blow-to-crypto-why-all-is-not-lost-for-digital-assets/ar-AA2cgDya

[6] https://www.barrons.com/articles/sec-regulation-crypto-assets-c701098d



Re: (Score:3)

by tendrousbeastie ( 961038 )

Which is all fine. But at some point most people want to sell the Bitcoin for dollars or pounds or euros or whatever. Since these are issued by an regulated by governments, it isn't a surprise that they want some say over how those transactions are managed.

Re: (Score:1)

by Anonymous Coward

> The CLARITY Act failing is good for Bitcoin because Bitcoin does not need government permission to exist. Bitcoin has no CEO, issuer, or central authority. Its rules are enforced by mathematics and a decentralized network. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. No government can print more bitcoin to fund spending or dilute holders. The supply schedule is predetermined and transparent.

And ALL of that, amounts to nothing without someone perceiving and injecting VALUE in it.

And right now that value (for Bitcoin) is corruptly overvalued. Which was ultimately its downfall here. Rather hard to define a new “investment” in America when the fucking thing is successfully cosplaying as a “currency” trading tens of thousands higher than the current fiat solution. Fiscal stability isn’t the picture being painted. The value of a dollar does not swing in the fucking

America (Score:3)

by fluffernutter ( 1411889 )

Everything in America fails.

Isn't that thing dead already? (Score:2)

by evanh ( 627108 )

I figured AI speculation had sucked the life out of crypto speculation.

Re: (Score:2)

by gweihir ( 88907 )

There is still a large enough supply for suckers in crapto.

US congress is weak (Score:2)

by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 )

> ... difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

No, it's easy: Publish a policy statement declaring bitcoin revenue (not profit) will have a sales tax of 50%, and it will be applied retroactively, to sales that occurred from 2026, onward. We know the Democratic Party will never hold the Fortune 500 family, accountable. So, that money will be used to buy the next president of the USA.

TL;DR: The USA refuses to tax the rich.

Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred,
Tan me hide when I'm dead.
So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde,
It's hanging there on the shed.

All together now...
Tie me kangaroo down, sport,
Tie me kangaroo down.
Tie me kangaroo down, sport,
Tie me kangaroo down.