Trump, SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig are set to meet Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto executives at the White House on Aug. 19, just as the CLARITY Act's odds of becoming law this year collapse. Polymarket now prices the bill's passage at roughly 19%, while Galaxy Digital puts it at 10%, with an ethics dispute over Trump's crypto ventures still unresolved.
President Donald Trump, Atkins and Selig are expected to meet crypto and prediction-market executives at the White House next week as the industry's biggest legislative priority faces dwindling odds of becoming law this year. The Aug. 19 gathering is expected to include executives from Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple, Chainlink, Kalshi and Paradigm, along with representatives from the Digital Chamber, Kraken, Gemini, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
The meeting comes less than a month before the Senate takes its next procedural step on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would set federal rules for crypto markets and divide oversight between the SEC and CFTC. Polymarket traders assigned the bill a roughly 19% probability of being signed into law in 2026, down from a peak of 82% on Feb. 19. That is still nearly twice Galaxy Digital's 10% estimate for passage this year.
A bipartisan coalition hits a September wall
CLARITY entered the summer with substantial bipartisan support in both chambers. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill 15-9 on May 14, with two Democrats joining all 13 Republicans, after the House approved its version 294-134 in July 2025 with 78 Democrats backing it.
However, talks broke down over restrictions on crypto activity by senior officials, stablecoin-reward limits and illicit-finance protections. The central obstacle is now an ethics dispute tied to Trump's crypto ventures. A bipartisan group of senators sent the White House a proposed ethics framework on July 30, but the administration has not publicly agreed to it, and Galaxy Digital said supporters may lack a viable path to the 60 votes needed to advance the bill without a compromise.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed before the August recess, setting up a vote when the Senate returns Sept. 14. But the chamber is expected to spend only about three weeks in session before lawmakers leave Washington around Oct. 2 for midterm campaigning, leaving little room for another breakdown.
Regulators press ahead without Congress
As CLARITY stalls, the SEC and CFTC are already testing how far they can shape crypto policy under existing law. The SEC has been developing Reg Crypto and an Innovation Exemption for tokenized securities, but it canceled a scheduled Aug. 14 vote on the crypto-offering proposal without setting a new date.
The CFTC is moving more assertively. It will hold its first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting on Aug. 20, building on its assertive stance toward prediction markets. On Aug. 11, the CFTC invoked emergency authority after Kalshi warned that a New York lawsuit could disrupt its federally regulated event-contract market, ordering the exchange to keep operating under federal derivatives rules.
Neither agency can replicate CLARITY's permanence through rulemaking alone. That tension will follow Atkins and Selig into next week's White House meeting, where they face the same executives whose businesses sit at the center of both the stalled bill and the regulators' effort to move without it.
Source: CryptoSlate
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