Crypto's Legislative Progress Persists Despite Clarity Bill's Senate Stalled Status

Crypto's Legislative Progress Persists Despite Clarity Bill's Senate Stalled Status While the crypto industry's marquee legislative priority, the Clarity bill, has not passed the Senate, recent federal developments mark significant regulatory progress compared to the hostile climate of past years. The House passed the Clarity market structure bill in 2025 following 2024's FIT21, but the measure has yet to pass the Senate. Federal policy has advanced through the enactment of the GENIUS stablecoin law, the overturn of the IRS DeFi broker rule, the rescission of SAB 121, and the withdrawal of FinCEN's Unhosted Wallet Rule. The SEC and CFTC are actively proposing rules and guidance around token offerings, centralized exchanges, custody, and tokenized stock trading. Because agency guidance and proposals remain vulnerable to shifting presidential administrations, durable statutory legislation remains the industry's ultimate goal. Shift from Hostility to Legislative Traction A few years ago, crypto builders in the U.S. faced pervasive SEC lawsuits, fallout from the FTX fraud, and strict tax-reporting rules that drove founders abroad. Since then, industry policy engagement has led to bipartisan House passage of comprehensive market structure bills twice: FIT21 in 2024 and Clarity in 2025. Although Clarity has not yet cleared the Senate, it reflects a major shift in Washington's willingness to craft operational frameworks for digital assets. Concrete Legislative and Regulatory Wins Federal policy has yielded tangible outcomes, led by the passage of the GENIUS law regulating stablecoin issuance and consumer protections. Additionally, Congress overturned the IRS's unworkable DeFi broker rule, the SEC rescinded its SAB 121 accounting directive, and FinCEN withdrew its Unhosted Wallet Rule. Concurrently, both the SEC and CFTC have issued guidance and rule proposals covering token offerings, onchain tokenized stocks, custody, and centralized exchanges. The Continuing Need for Statutory Certainty Agency-level proposals, guidance, and exemptions do not provide the permanence required for decade-long business investments, as administrative stances can shift after elections. To establish durable rules that protect consumers and clarify compliance, the industry continues to push for comprehensive legislation like Clarity to provide a lasting statutory foundation.

a16z总结加密监管进展：立法遇阻但政策环境已获重大突破 尽管行业头号立法优先事项Clarity法案尚未在参议院通过，但加密行业在华盛顿并非空手而归。过去数年间，行业推动了稳定币联邦立法、清除了多项监管壁垒，并促使监管机构出台了更具建设性的规则框架。 Clarity法案虽未在参议院通过，但众议院已两度以跨党派支持通过全面市场结构法案（2024年的FIT21与2025年的Clarity）。 稳定币法案GENIUS已正式成为法律，相关机构正在推进落地实施。 国会推翻了国税局针对DeFi的经纪商规则，SEC废除了SAB 121，FinCEN也撤回了未托管钱包规则。 SEC与CFTC正通过代币发行框架、资产托管新规及集中交易所监管提案主动回应行业关切，但最终仍需长久立法确立确定性。 监管环境转变与实质性政策成果 不到三年前，加密行业在美面临严峻生存挑战，包括SEC的诉讼、缺乏可行合规框架以及FTX事件后的信任危机。行业随后建立了政策团队与游说能力。目前，美国已通过了规范稳定币发行的联邦法律GENIUS，多项阻碍行业发展的政策（如IRS的DeFi数据收集要求、SEC的SAB 121会计壁垒及FinCEN的未托管钱包规则）均已被废除或撤回。 监管机构主动推进与立法局限性 监管机构正在积极行动：SEC提出了代币融资与资产保护框架，批准了部分代币化股票链上交易的豁免；CFTC提出了中心化交易所监管路径。尽管Clarity法案暂未通过参议院，但众议院已两次通过综合市场结构法案。然而，行政指导与豁免受选举周期影响较大，行业仍需具备长期法律效力的正式立法以提供持久基础。

I’ve been reading the postmortems on Clarity, and some of the criticism is fair. Clarity is the industry’s biggest legislative priority. We worked hard on it. And it hasn’t passed the Senate. That’s a setback, and it deserves serious accounting. But much of the commentary describes an industry that made a huge effort in Washington and came away empty-handed. You have to leave out a lot of the story to tell it that way. Less than three years ago, a founder building a crypto company in America faced a basic question: am I going to be allowed to do this? And it was a reasonable question. The SEC was suing major companies across the industry; there was no workable framework for ensuring these projects could comply with the law, and the official position was that everyone already had all the rules they needed. Builders had few options. They could hire more lawyers, leave the United States, or both. The industry had already been through the fight over sweeping crypto tax-reporting provisions in the 2021 infrastructure bill. Then FTX turned out to be a spectacular fraud, and people who had nothing to do with it spent the next year explaining that blockchain technology had nothing to do with it. Founders headed overseas. Trying to persuade Washington to work on crypto regulation in that environment went about as well as you’d expect. The goal has always been simple: establish clear rules so people can build here and customers are protected. The industry has been working toward that goal for the better part of a decade. For much of that time, simply getting taken seriously in Washington was a project. So the community built the capacity to do something about it: policy teams, political operations, coalitions. Founders came to Washington to explain the fundamentals of blockchain networks to people who mostly knew crypto from its worst headlines. There was nothing inevitable about what followed. And yet that work produced significant results. Start with stablecoins. The U.S. now has a federal law governing their issuance, with requirements for the companies behind them and protections for customers. GENIUS is law, other countries are following suit, and agencies are working through implementation. We’ve gone from debating whether Washington would ever pass meaningful crypto legislation to working through how a major crypto law gets implemented. That’s just the most visible achievement. Last year, Congress also overturned the IRS’s DeFi broker rule, a data collection mandate that was essentially impossible for blockchain software to comply with. The SEC also rescinded SAB 121, removing a major accounting obstacle to institutions holding crypto for customers, and FinCEN just withdrew the dangerous “Unhosted Wallet Rule.” These were threats and barriers that companies were spending time and money figuring out how to live with. They’re now gone. Then there’s the proactive work happening at the agencies. The SEC has proposed a framework for raising money through token offerings and new rules for safeguarding crypto assets. It has issued an exemption allowing certain tokenized stocks to trade onchain. The CFTC just proposed a path for regulating centralized exchanges. And the SEC and CFTC have provided guidance on how existing law applies to crypto assets, helping to answer questions of critical importance to the industry: How do you launch a token? How can it trade? Who can hold assets for customers, and what obligations should they have? These are some of the very questions the industry spent years trying to get Washington to answer. They’re also central to the effort behind Clarity. The House has now passed comprehensive crypto market structure legislation twice, with bipartisan support: FIT21 in 2024 and Clarity in 2025. And a great deal of that work is moving forward through agency proposals, guidance, and exemptions, even though the bill isn’t law. The U.S. government is working out the conditions under which crypto projects can operate safely here, which was the point all along — and still is. There is an obvious limitation here. Proposed rules aren’t final. Guidance and exemptions only go so far. A company making a ten-year investment would understandably like to know that the rules won’t depend on the outcome of every presidential election. That is a big part of why the industry pushed so hard for Clarity. Legislation can settle questions agencies can’t settle on their own and give companies a foundation that lasts beyond whoever happens to be in charge. The job isn’t finished. Getting legislation signed into law is hard, even when there is broad agreement that it’s needed. We need rules that companies can count on for the long term, whether through durable rulemaking or legislation. We’ll continue to push for Clarity and other laws that set clear rules and protect consumers. Not long ago, founders were making plans around the possibility that they couldn’t stay in America. That’s not the case anymore. We have a federal stablecoin law, and regulators are at work writing a raft of sensible rules for everyone to follow. Now we need to make sure the progress lasts. That is a problem to solve. It is also a very different problem from the one we had three years ago.