The U.S. Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act on Tuesday, falling short of the 60 votes needed to move the crypto market structure bill forward. Democrats blocked the measure over ethics provisions tied to President Trump's crypto wealth, and the setback pushes the industry back toward the SEC and CFTC for near-term rules.
The U.S. Senate rejected cloture on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Tuesday, falling short of the 60 votes required to advance it. That result effectively blocks further Senate consideration of the bill for now.
This defeat lands after years of lobbying and hundreds of millions of dollars spent pushing Congress toward market structure legislation. Negotiators had assembled more than 600 pages of compromise text before an ethics dispute reopened in the final stretch.
Trump's crypto wealth splits the vote
The impasse centers on ethics provisions covering senior officials' crypto holdings. Trump's own crypto wealth has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars linked to World Liberty Financial and his TRUMP memecoin, and Democrats made that wealth their central objection.
Republicans' revised text would let state attorneys general sue crypto exchanges and the Justice Department to enforce the ethics rules, and would require officials to divest a large financial interest or place it in a blind trust. Democrats called that unenforceable, since the Justice Department would decide whether to bring any enforcement action against the president. Leading Republican negotiator Cynthia Lummis then rejected a Monday counteroffer that would have broadened the restrictions to cover Trump's children and required a sale rather than a trust.
According to Decrypt, Lummis said afterward: "It's over."
Regulators fill the vacuum
With the bill stalled, the industry turns back to the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which are already moving on their own crypto rules. The SEC recently proposed Regulation Crypto Assets to give crypto projects a path to raise money without triggering full securities registration.
But SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said the new rules and exemptions won't be durable without a law behind them, since agency guidance can be reversed as easily as it was written. The dispute also stalled unresolved fights over stablecoin rewards and illicit-finance safeguards that had dogged the bill for months.
A narrower path ahead
Time is short: the House won't vote until after the November midterms, and if Democrats take either chamber, market structure legislation is unlikely to be a top priority for Maxine Waters or Elizabeth Warren, who would chair the relevant committees. The industry's last major win, the GENIUS Act stablecoin law, passed in 2025.
Sources: CoinDesk, The Block, Decrypt
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
