The cryptocurrency industry is mounting an intense lobbying push to secure passage of the CLARITY Act before the Senate's August recess, with major financial firms and technology associations joining the effort to establish the first comprehensive federal framework for digital assets.
Charles Schwab, the Consumer Technology Association, and the Trump administration have all urged lawmakers to advance the bill, which would classify Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana as digital commodities and create a clear jurisdictional divide between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The legislation has emerged as the most significant attempt to date to bring regulatory coherence to a market that has long operated in a gray zone of overlapping and sometimes contradictory rules.
SEC Chair Paul Atkins has signaled readiness to implement new rules if Congress stalls, but industry participants say regulatory guidance from the commission alone would lack the statutory certainty that institutional investors require before committing significant capital. The CLARITY Act, by contrast, would embed definitions and exemptions in federal law, making it harder for a future administration to reverse course.
The push comes as the cryptocurrency market shows tentative signs of stabilization. Bitcoin has traded in a tight range near $63,000 to $65,000 in recent sessions, while Ethereum has held above $1,800. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded modest inflows last week, snapping a prolonged outflow streak that had weighed on sentiment through much of June.
Institutional interest extends beyond Bitcoin. Morgan Stanley Investment Management launched an Ethereum Staking exchange-traded product this month, while Robinhood Chain, a new Ethereum Layer 2 built on the Arbitrum stack, went live with tokenized stocks and ETFs and quickly surpassed $1 billion in decentralized exchange trading volume. These developments suggest that the infrastructure for institutional crypto participation is maturing even as the regulatory framework lags behind.
Not all stakeholders support the current version of the bill. The New York Attorney General has raised concerns about certain provisions, and some consumer advocates worry that the legislation's commodity definitions are too broad and could allow certain token offerings to evade investor protections. The CFTC, for its part, has warned about risks in crypto prediction markets, a separate but related area of regulatory attention.
The Senate is expected to vote on a procedural motion as early as this week, though aides cautioned that the legislative calendar is crowded and that passage before the August recess is far from guaranteed. If the bill stalls, the industry will likely turn its attention to SEC rulemaking and state-level initiatives, a patchwork approach that has frustrated digital asset firms for years.
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