Bitcoin rebounded to $63,920 on Monday after an early slide tied to a Strategy bitcoin sale. Prediction-market odds on the CLARITY Act's passage this year fell to 27%. The White House still has not answered a bipartisan ethics counterproposal from Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego, leaving one of the bill's major obstacles unresolved five days before the Senate's August 7 recess.
Bitcoin clawed back from an intraday low of $62,216 to touch $63,920 on Monday, trimming its slide before easing to around $63,680 by early afternoon. The bounce lifted bitcoin's daily gain to 0.7%, and its market capitalization ticked up to roughly $1.28 trillion.
The early drop appeared linked to reports that Strategy had completed its third bitcoin sale of 2026, offloading 1,638 coins between July 27 and Aug. 2 to fund preferred-dividend payments and STRC share buybacks. Derivatives markets felt the pressure too: nearly $82 million in leveraged positions were liquidated over 24 hours, with short bets making up almost $50 million of that total.
Ethics Impasse Stalls a Vote
The bigger overhang for bitcoin remains Washington. Crypto journalist Eleanor Terrett reported that the White House still has not responded to a bipartisan ethics counterproposal from Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego, who want state attorneys general empowered to sue the Department of Justice if it fails to enforce the CLARITY Act's ethics rule. According to CryptoPotato, quoting Terrett: “A deal on the CLARITY Act’s biggest outstanding issue has yet to materialize” heading into the week of a potential vote.
Democrats had opposed an earlier ethics provision the White House had already signed off on, which put enforcement solely in the DOJ's hands. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has yet to file a motion for cloture, so a final vote is unlikely to hold before Friday at the earliest.
Odds Keep Sliding Before Recess
Prediction markets have moved with the deadlock. Polymarket data show the odds of Trump signing the CLARITY Act into law this year have fallen below 30% again, to 27%. Bitcoin News separately tracked a slide from 38% to 27% over the past week. CryptoPotato's own reading puts the current odds at 28%, down from roughly 70% earlier this year.
Other Hurdles Beyond Ethics
Ethics is not the only friction point. Several prosecutors and law-enforcement groups have pushed back against the bill's BRCA provision, arguing it would make it harder to crack down on illicit finance, and the National Sheriffs' Association raised its own concerns about the bill's DeFi provision. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back, noting that non-custodial builders and developers have never been subject to registration obligations under the Bank Secrecy Act and that the bill simply codifies the department's long-standing policy.
Clearing the Senate still requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Unless Republicans offer concessions on ethics safeguards and resolve banking-industry objections over stablecoin yield, the bill will fall short of that threshold before recess. If the bill is shelved until fall, its odds will deteriorate further as the midterm campaign consumes the legislative calendar.
Sources: CoinGape, Bitcoin News, CryptoPotato
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