Polymarket traders in February put the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act’s chances of being signed into law at 82%. By Saturday, those odds had slumped to roughly 19%.
Galaxy Digital takes an even dimmer view than the betting crowd. The firm pegs the odds of passage this year at 10% — under half of what Polymarket traders are pricing in.
That figure looms over the White House meeting set for Aug. 19, where President Donald Trump and the leaders of the two agencies that would divide crypto oversight under CLARITY are due to sit down with the executives whose years of lobbying spending produced the bill in the first place.
Who’s actually in the room
Reports say the guest list features executives from Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple, Chainlink, Kalshi and Paradigm, along with representatives of the Digital Chamber. Invitations have also gone out to Kraken, Gemini, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
Trump is expected to take part alongside Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins is also due to attend. The final attendance list could still change.
Consider that lineup. Two federal regulators, a sitting president with crypto ventures of his own, a prediction market currently battling a state in court, and two of the country’s largest traditional exchanges. That isn’t a policy briefing. It’s a negotiation.
The bill had the votes. Then it didn’t.
CLARITY opened the year with something most crypto legislation never enjoys: genuine bipartisan support in both chambers.
H.R. 3633 cleared the House 294-134 in July 2025, picking up 78 Democratic votes. The Senate Banking Committee then advanced the legislation 15-9 on May 14, with Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks siding with all 13 Republicans.
By summer that coalition had fractured — and largely not over the substance of how token markets should be regulated.
Negotiations went sour over restrictions on crypto activity by senior government officials, caps on stablecoin rewards and illicit finance safeguards. Banks pressed lawmakers to rein in rewards paid out by stablecoin platforms, cautioning that yield-bearing products could siphon deposits away from the traditional banking system.
The biggest roadblock right now is the ethics dispute over Trump's own crypto businesses. A bipartisan group of senators delivered a proposed ethics framework to the White House on July 30. The administration has yet to publicly sign on to it.
Galaxy Digital said the fight has effectively moved from a policy negotiation into a political one. Without a compromise, Galaxy said, backers may have no realistic route to the 60 Senate votes needed to move the bill forward.
The calendar is the real problem
The deadlock carried CLARITY past the Senate’s August recess with no floor vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune did file cloture on the motion to proceed before members left town, teeing up an early test when the chamber reconvenes Sept. 14.
This is where the arithmetic turns brutal. Senators are expected to be in session only about three weeks before heading out of Washington around Oct. 2 to campaign for the midterms.
By Galaxy’s estimate, CLARITY would have to start moving almost immediately, and swallow a substantial share of those three weeks, to stand a realistic chance of clearing the chamber this year. One more breakdown and the schedule simply runs out.
Meanwhile, the regulators aren’t waiting
Both agencies are already probing how much of Washington’s crypto agenda they can deliver under the laws already on the books.
Under Atkins, the SEC has two efforts in development: Reg Crypto, a tailored framework for certain crypto offerings, and an Innovation Exemption that would allow limited experimentation with tokenized securities and onchain trading.
The rollout has been uneven. The commission had penciled in an Aug. 14 vote on the crypto-offering proposal, then scrapped the meeting a day beforehand without setting a replacement date. The Innovation Exemption has likewise slipped amid pushback from parts of the traditional securities industry.
Both proposals wade into questions CLARITY is meant to settle on a more permanent basis, including how digital assets are issued and traded and which federal rules apply to them. That stop-start progress is a fair gauge of how far regulators can actually stretch while Congress stays split.
The CFTC is moving faster and picking fights
Selig said the agency has to hear directly from the companies building new financial products if regulators want to keep pace with innovation. The CFTC convenes its first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting on Aug. 20, gathering executives, entrepreneurs and market participants to discuss where financial regulation heads next.
That comes after a blunter intervention. On Aug. 11, the CFTC invoked emergency authority after Kalshi warned that a lawsuit filed by New York could disrupt its federally regulated event-contract market nationwide.
Selig directed the exchange to keep operating under federal derivatives rules and has maintained that states cannot override the national framework governing CFTC-regulated markets. It is one theater in a wider clash between the commission and several states over whether prediction contracts belong under federal derivatives law or state gambling rules.
Neither agency can replicate CLARITY’s full breadth or permanence through exemptions, rulemaking and fresh readings of existing statute. Both are assembling pieces of the framework anyway.
That is the tension the executives walk into on Wednesday. The meeting, though, isn’t the tell. The cloture vote when the Senate returns Sept. 14 is — and by then roughly three weeks will be left on the clock.