I spent this past week in Washington, walking the halls of the Senate and sitting across from staffers in office after office. I came home more convinced than ever of something that sounds counterintuitive, given the headlines: on the actual policy of crypto market structure, we are very close. Call it 80–85% finished. The remaining 15–20% standing between the CLARITY Act and the President's desk has almost nothing to do with how we regulate digital assets, and almost everything to do with one family's brokerage statement.
Let me explain what I saw because the noise out of DC right now is making this look messier than it actually is.
Where We Actually Are
First, the procedural state of play, because it matters. The CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633) passed the House 294–134 back in July 2025. On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee advanced it 15–9, with Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks crossing over to give it bipartisan support. As of June 1–2, the bill sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar as No. 423 — formally in the queue, eligible to be scheduled, but with no floor date announced.
That's the headline most people stop at. But "on the calendar" is not "ready for a vote." Before this can get to 60 votes on the floor, three mechanical things still have to happen: the Banking Committee text has to be merged with the Senate Agriculture Committee's version; the law-enforcement community has to make peace with the DeFi developer protections; and the ethics provision — which isn't even in the current draft — has to be written and bolted on. Lummis herself laid out the to-do list plainly: wrap the Banking bill with the Ag bill, with the ethics language, with some GENIUS Act tweaks. Nobody, in her words, is popping the champagne yet.
Here's why I'm still optimistic anyway: of those three, two are effectively solved, and the third is a political problem wearing a policy costume.
The Yield Scare Was a Head Fake
For a minute there, it looked like the banks were going to blow the whole thing up over stablecoin yield. The compromise Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks spent four months brokering — now Section 404 — draws a clean line: no passive, deposit-like interest just for holding a dollar-pegged token, but activity-based rewards tied to real on-chain usage (staking, payments, loyalty) are fine. It's a sensible needle to thread, and it directly answers the banks' deposit-flight fear.
The banks rejected it anyway. On May 9, five days before the markup, the big trade groups — ABA, BPI, ICBA, and the rest — formally came out against even the watered-down version, and Jamie Dimon has kept up the drumbeat since. My read, reinforced by nearly every office I sat in last week, is that this fight is over, even if the lobby won't admit it. The bill advanced 15–9 with the banks screaming, Tillis-Alsobrooks held, and the staffers I met simply do not treat yield as a live obstacle anymore. The compromise even ships with a multi-agency study on deposit impact, which gives everyone a face-saving "we'll revisit if the data turns" off-ramp. When a lobby's best move is a study clause, it suggests the lobby has lost. Yield is noise now.
The One Thing That Actually Matters: Ethics
Which brings us to the real blocker, and it's the one that isn't really about crypto at all.
The sticking point is the ethics provision — the conflict-of-interest language meant to bar senior officials from profiting from the industry they regulate. And let's be honest about its genesis, because everyone in that building is: this exists because of the Trump family's own crypto ventures. World Liberty Financial, the memecoins, the rest of it. Estimates of what they've pulled in since January 2025 run from Bloomberg's ~$1.4 billion to Reuters' ~$2.3 billion. That's the elephant, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time.
Watch how the politics have played out. In committee, Chris Van Hollen's amendment — which would have barred the President, VP, and members of Congress from owning or participating in crypto businesses — went down 13–11. But notice how it lost: Bernie Moreno led the opposition on procedural grounds, arguing ethics rules belong to Judiciary, not Banking, so the amendment was out of order. Nobody on the GOP side wanted to argue the merits — that would mean either defending the family's dealings or conceding there's a conflict. The jurisdictional dodge let them strip the provision without ever touching the substance. Smart politics. But it just punted the fight to the floor.
And on the floor, the math is unforgiving. You need 60 votes, which means roughly seven Democrats. Kirsten Gillibrand has drawn the line in concrete: no ethics provision, no Democratic votes. Her framing of the three pillars — consumer protection, illicit finance, and ethics — is now the price of admission, and she's said she won't let members of Congress, senior officials, presidents, or vice presidents get rich off insider status. Meanwhile, the White House has been equally firm that it won't tolerate a bill that targets the President personally.
That collision is exactly why this week's negotiations turned, in one Democratic source's words, "rocky." The closed-door group — Gillibrand, Gallego, Moreno, Lummis, plus the White House's Patrick Witt — reconvened June 9 for the first time since their tentative May framework and came away empty. Republicans and the White House walked back a piece that would have let state attorneys general sue the DOJ for failing to enforce the ethics rules; the GOP counter was to limit enforcement to the Attorney General and float impeachment as the "remedy," which Democrats correctly read as no remedy at all. The next day, the administration hosted law enforcement groups to calm fears that the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act developer protections could shield bad actors from investigation.
Here is the part I want to underline, and it's the through-line from all my meetings: this is no longer a policy disagreement. It's a political problem. Nobody around that table is actually arguing about whether senior officials should be allowed to mint tokens while in office – even the White House says it wants a broad provision. They're arguing about enforcement teeth and, underneath that, about optics. And the optics get worse by the week, because we are walking straight into a midterm election. Elizabeth Warren is already waving a survey showing only 1% of voters rank crypto as a priority and branding the whole thing as turbocharging the President's "crypto corruption." Every Democrat who votes yes without an ironclad ethics guardrail is handing an opponent a 30-second ad. That's the real gravity here, not the regulatory text.
The Way Through (My Actual Prediction)
So how does this get unstuck? My bet — and this is the read I came back from DC with — is that the path forward is to make the ban bigger, not narrower.
The reason the ethics provision is radioactive is that it reads as a measure aimed at one man and his family. That framing is poison for the White House, which can't be seen surrendering to a Trump-specific carve-out, and it lets Republicans hide behind "you're just trying to embarrass the President." Take that framing away. Write a clean, across-the-board prohibition on crypto business activity — issuing tokens, operating ventures, taking the upside — that applies to the President, the Vice President, the entire senior executive branch, and all of Congress, with no names and no exceptions. Make it about the office, not the officeholder.
That move does three things at once. It gives the White House the "this doesn't single out the President" cover it has explicitly said it wants. It gives Gillibrand and the Democrats the genuine guardrail they're demanding — arguably a stronger one, since it sweeps in Congress too. And it strips Republicans of the procedural and political dodges, because now you're not voting on Trump, you're voting on whether anyone in government should trade the assets they oversee. Vote against that in an election year and explain it back home.
The tell that this is the landing zone: both sides have already gestured at it. The White House wants breadth. Gillibrand's own language already names Congress, the administration, the President, and the VP. The scope isn't the fight — they're closer than they look. The fight is enforcement, and an all-encompassing ban makes the enforcement question easier to swallow, because a rule that binds every member of Congress isn't a weapon pointed at the executive; it's a standard everyone lives under. Depersonalize it, and you have your seven votes.
What Happens in the Next Six Weeks
There are roughly 31 session days — about eight weeks — before the Senate leaves for August recess, and that recess is the real deadline, because once members go home, the campaign swallows everything. The White House floated July 4 as its symbolic target; Lummis has already walked that back to "more likely after the July 13 return." The bill itself may take a full week of floor time, and it has to compete for that time against FISA reauthorization and the rest of the must-pass pile.
My base case: the merged text and the ethics language come together in the back half of June into early July, a floor vote lands in mid-to-late July, and — if the ethics provision goes broad the way I've described — it clears with low-to-mid 60s. Then it goes back to the House, where Gillibrand says she's already been swapping drafts with French Hill and Maxine Waters precisely so the House can take up the Senate version fast rather than triggering a full conference. Signature in early August. That's roughly where Galaxy's Alex Thorn has it too — about 75% for 2026, with a signing penciled for the week of August 3. The prediction markets are more skeptical — Kalshi has been hovering around the low 50s, which is fine; that's what makes a market.
The bear case is simple and real: ethics and law enforcement, the two fragile points in this coalition, fractured in the same week rather than one at a time. If neither gets resolved before the recess, the practical window for 2026 closes, and given how long this has already taken, "we'll get it next Congress" can quietly become "we'll get it next decade."
But I don't think that's where this lands. The substance is done. The lobbies are out of real ammunition. What's left is a political optics problem with a clean political solution sitting right there. Make the ban universal, take the President's name off the table by putting everyone's name on it, and this bill becomes law before Labor Day.
We're 85% there. The last 15% is just Washington being Washington.
Sources & Further Reading
And That’s Our Two Satoshis!
