CLARITY Act Projected To Pass As Updated Text Lands

For a bill that spent most of the summer being written off, the CLARITY Act is suddenly moving with purpose. This week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the crypto market structure legislation as sitting at the “one-yard line” and urged Congress to pass it before the early-August recess, the most senior executive-branch endorsement the effort has drawn. Bitcoin climbed more than 2 percent toward $67,000 within hours, and Coinbase shares jumped as much as 12.6 percent on the session. Bitcoin was last changing hands near $65,900.

The Bessent comments capped a fast few days. President Trump accepted the ethics provision that had stalled negotiations for weeks, updated bill text began circulating, and Senator Bernie Moreno told reporters the revised version was on its way with a wry warning: “You guys have a lot of reading to do.” Floor action is being targeted before lawmakers leave Washington.

Prediction markets have noticed. On Polymarket, the contract on whether the CLARITY Act is signed into law in 2026 has rebounded to around 39 percent, up roughly 11 points since reports of the ethics agreement and well off the record-low 24 percent it touched on July 13. That is still below the 74 percent the market priced after the Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill 15 to 9 in May, and below February’s 82 percent peak. But the direction has flipped from steady decline to sharp recovery. Traders eyeing a sub-50 number should note what it actually measures: not the odds of Senate approval alone, but every remaining step, revised text, floor time, and a presidential signature, all before December 31.

What is actually in the bill

The revised text, released through Senator Cynthia Lummis’s Senate Banking subcommittee, keeps the architecture that cleared committee. At its core, the bill ends years of regulation by enforcement by drawing a statutory line between the two agencies that have spent a decade fighting over turf. Investment-contract assets stay with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which gains a certification path that lets qualifying network tokens be treated as non-securities. Digital commodity spot markets move to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which would register exchanges, brokers, dealers, and custodians.

Beyond that jurisdictional split, several provisions carry real weight for builders. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, folded in as Section 10604, clarifies that non-custodial software developers and blockchain infrastructure providers are not treated as money transmitters, lifting a liability that has shadowed open-source development for years. The stablecoin section preserves the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise, prohibiting interest on idle payment stablecoin balances while allowing rewards tied to genuine activity such as transactions or staking, so long as they are not functionally equivalent to bank deposit interest. A dedicated law enforcement title funds state and local investigators and establishes a digital asset cyber innovation center. And a new ethics division bars the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and federal judges, along with their spouses, from issuing or sponsoring digital assets for compensation while in office, with a sunset in January 2029.

The ethics fight, and the honest asterisk

The ethics package, negotiated between the White House and Republican Senators Lummis and Moreno, is where the remaining fight sits. Its backers frame it as a first-of-its-kind clean-government standard applied from the President down, enforced by the Justice Department with civil penalties and disclosure requirements. Democrats, who say they have not signed off on the text, want state attorneys general involved in enforcement rather than leaving it solely to the DOJ. Senator Ruben Gallego called the current provisions “very weak,” and further bipartisan negotiation is expected before a floor vote.

That is the honest asterisk on the optimism. The bill still needs 60 votes, which means at least seven Democrats have to cross over, and they are not there yet. The Banking and Agriculture versions also have to be reconciled, and the Senate calendar before the recess is thin. None of that is trivial.

What passage would unlock

The case for what a signed bill would unlock is what has analysts leaning in. Clear rules are widely seen as the missing catalyst for the institutional capital that has stayed parked on the sidelines. Ric Edelman, who founded the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, has argued the bill could open the door to the roughly 95 percent of institutional money still outside crypto. Citi has floated a $143,000 Bitcoin target and Standard Chartered a $150,000 target, both explicitly contingent on passage and both citing regulatory clarity as the unlock for spot ETF inflows and corporate treasury adoption. JPMorgan analysts have called mid-2026 passage a potential positive catalyst for the second half.

Those are scenario-based estimates rather than forecasts, and the same banks have revised them repeatedly as the timeline shifted, so they are better read as a gauge of direction than a number to bank on. This is not investment advice. What is not in dispute is the pattern: when the bill cleared committee in May, Bitcoin was trading near $81,000, and every meaningful step toward passage this year has coincided with a bid for spot ETFs.

The competitive backdrop sharpens the urgency. With the European Union’s MiCA regime now in full force and licensing frameworks maturing across Asia and the Gulf, supporters argue a settled US rulebook is what keeps developers and capital onshore rather than routing them abroad. Galaxy Digital chief executive Mike Novogratz said over the weekend that negotiations had narrowed to final drafting changes. Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, summed up the industry mood in a single phrase: “crunch time for Clarity.”

The window is narrow, and the ethics language still has to satisfy enough Democrats to reach 60. But a bill that looked stranded two weeks ago now has the Treasury Secretary counting yards to the goal line, public text on the table, and a prediction market climbing rather than falling. After a year of near-misses, the CLARITY Act is closer to the finish than it has been all summer, and the clock, for once, is working in its favor.