CLARITY Act, blocked in the Senate: causes and consequences for the crypto market
11 AUG, 2026
By Joanna Piwko from RankiaPro Europe
The US Senate adjourned on August 8, 2026 without voting on the CLARITY Act, the law that would have assigned a stable federal framework to digital assets for the first time. A few days later, the useful question is no longer "what happened", but why the text got stuck just a step away from the finish line and what real consequences the postponement entails, regardless of the short-term noise.
The causes of the block
The postponement does not stem from a single obstacle, but from three knots that have added up at the same political moment.
The first is the dispute over stablecoin returns. The Senate draft allows stablecoin holders to receive remuneration but prohibits passive interests similar to those of traditional bank deposits: banks read this asymmetry as the risk of a deposit flight towards the crypto world without the regulatory protections equivalent to those of banks, and have pushed for a crackdown.
The second is a ethical issue. In the May text of the Banking Commission, a rule that prohibited public officials from holding cryptocurrencies while actively regulating them, a measure originally born for the Trump family's initiatives in the sector, was eliminated to facilitate its approval. The clause was then reintroduced as a separate proposal, with a temporary ban valid for the current administration until 2029, reopening the clash between the two sides.
The third knot is simply a matter of schedule. The two versions of the Senate text (Banking and Agriculture) still had to be unified before they could be voted on in the chamber, and the work schedule was already full of priorities with binding deadlines (government funding, defense authorization law, renewal of surveillance legislation), against which a market structure reform without a peremptory deadline has lost positions.
What the CLARITY Act provided (and could still provide)
The heart of the proposal is the division of competencies between the two regulators: the SEC would retain jurisdiction over financial securities and capital raising, while the CFTC would assume primary supervision of the spot markets of "digital commodities". This would be accompanied by registration requirements for exchanges, brokers, dealers and custodians (segregation of client assets, capital requirements, transparency obligations, market surveillance, conflict of interest management), in addition to a specific disclosure regime for token networks and explicit protections for self-custody and for software developers not involved in network control.
The process, it must be said, has never been marginal: the text passed the House in July 2025 with 294 votes in favor and 134 against, and was approved by the Senate Banking Committee on May 14, 2026 with a margin of 15 to 9. It is the final stretch, the 60 votes needed to overcome obstructionism, a threshold that the 53 Republican senators cannot reach alone, that remains blocked.
Who would have the most to gain, and how much does the wait really matter
The main beneficiaries of a definitive regulation would be the blockchains based on smart contracts whose framework is still uncertain (Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Avalanche at the forefront), with Ethereum likely the first beneficiary due to its weight in the stablecoin ecosystem. Bitcoin, whose commodity status is already widely recognized, would gain less on the regulatory front, but could still indirectly benefit from greater banking participation and more regulated trading markets. DeFi, staking, tokenization and US exchanges fall within the same potential benefit perimeter, always conditioned by compliance with decentralization requirements and investor protection.
However, the practical effect of the wait on market access must be downsized: investors who were hoping for the law to gain easier access to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP have already obtained it through the SEC's approval of a standard path for the listing of ETFs and ETPs in the United States (a development that has moved faster than the legislative process). The specific contribution that the CLARITY Act would add is therefore not new access, but long-term legal stability: the transition from a provisional regulatory orientation, reversible by each new administration, to a binding and stable framework.
What remains in force in the meantime, and why it is fragile
In the absence of the law, the classification of digital assets is currently based on a joint SEC-CFTC interpretive guideline of March 17, 2026, which has divided 16 cryptocurrencies into five categories. It is an administrative solution, not a law: any new administration could revoke it without going through Congress. It is exactly the type of residual risk (not immediate, but real) that the CLARITY Act was designed to eliminate, and which remains open until possible approval.
The comparison with Europe
The postponement comes a few weeks from the end of the transitional period MiCA, on July 1, 2026: from that date, any crypto-asset service provider operating in the EU without full authorization must initiate the liquidation plan.
Europe has therefore already completed the transition towards a single framework with a passport valid in the 27 Member States, while the United States remains in a construction phase that, by default, will still produce a system different from MiCA: not a single framework, but a distribution of competences between the SEC, CFTC, federal banking regulators, FinCEN and States. It is therefore not correct to present a possible CLARITY Act as the American equivalent of MiCA: they solve different problems and will not create any common regulatory passport between the two sides of the Atlantic.
The reading for operators
Before the postponement of August 8, industry analysts had higher approval estimates for 2026 than the current ones: CoinShares (James Butterfill, August 7, 2026) estimated a probability around 60%, while 21shares (Eliézer Ndinga) placed it at 50%, both well above the 17% indicated today by Polymarket after the missed vote. Their quantitative assessments are therefore overtaken by events, but the analytical framework that accompanies them remains valid and should be read in light of the new postponement, not despite it.
The first point, from CoinShares, concerns the real extent of the impact: even in the event of approval, the regulation alone would hardly be enough to support a new long-term bullish cycle. Macro factors will continue to weigh more (global liquidity, Federal Reserve policy, dollar trend, flows to spot ETFs on Bitcoin and Ethereum), and it should be considered that regulators would still have up to 360 days after the signature to issue the implementing rules: the concrete effects would only be seen gradually. As Butterfill writes, "the most relevant issue is not so much whether the measure will be approved, but when".
The second point, from 21shares, shifts the focus from access to duration: since practical access to the main assets is already guaranteed by the ETF/ETP path, the real value of the law is the legal stability that would remove the classification of assets from the political oscillations of each new administration.
On the price front, Ndinga's analysis of the precedent of the 2024 US elections shows that Bitcoin did not react in a statistically significant way to the probabilities of a favorable scenario except in the last two weeks of the campaign, when an increase in the probabilities of a favorable outcome coincided with a rise of about 25%. Applying the same pattern to the CLARITY Act in view of the midterm elections in November, it is plausible to expect that the market's sensitivity to the probabilities of approval will only increase in the weeks immediately preceding an actual vote, not now. On the risk avoided by the rule, Ndinga is clear: "we are still talking about extreme and unlikely events, not an immediate threat".
The most concrete indirect beneficiary identified by 21shares remains tokenization (a market of tokenized government securities close to 30 billion dollars), which would see its regulatory risk profile reduced, while still being exposed to liquidity risks independent of the outcome of the law.
