Summary
- Things aren’t looking great for the crypto Clarity Act as it’s failed to get a procedural Senate vote this week, but that painful blow doesn’t herald an end of hope for U.S. crypto policy.
- The U.S. financial regulators are already at work trying to institute workable crypto policies, though chances are slim they’ll get the backing of a tailor-made law this year.
If the crypto industry’s Digital Asset Market Clarity Act fizzles in the U.S. Senate, the result may not be fatal, but it’s a heavy blow
The legislation has hit a wall, and the odds of it breaking through get slimmer by the moment. So a new law may not arrive this year to clearly define the distinctions among crypto securities, commodities and other assets, nor who is responsible for overseeing the companies that handle them. And the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission may not get the explicit authority to govern the commodity trading in which the bulk of crypto changes hands.
Before the contentious debates over stablecoin yield, illicit finance and the crypto ethics of government officials threatened to blow up the Clarity Act, the markets-oversight questions were the effort’s core aims. Being unable to put the CFTC in place to supervise the trading of tokens such as bitcoin BTC$65,281.66 and Ethereum’s ether ETH$1,933.74 means a serious chasm in U.S. oversight authority, though the derivatives regulator and its sister agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, have sought to bandage some of the gaps and will have room to take matters into their own hands if Congress doesn’t act.
