For years the crypto sector pushed Washington to pass the Clarity Act. This week the Senate shut it down, 49 votes in favor to 50 opposed. Michael Saylor, whose company sits on one of the largest bitcoin stockpiles anywhere, says he has no problem with that.
In a post on X on Saturday, the Strategy founder and chair made the case that a statute can cement restrictions just as readily as it cements rights. Seen his way, the bill’s defeat is a positive for the digital asset industry.
It is an unconventional take. On Tuesday, most lawmakers voted not to advance a measure that would have formally split oversight between regulators and defined which digital assets are securities, which are commodities and which are stablecoins. That is exactly the clarity companies have been pleading for ever since the Biden Administration fined them for allegedly selling unregistered securities.
Saylor’s reasoning: the regulators haven’t waited for Congress
The core of his argument is what the agencies are already doing on their own. The Securities and Exchange Commission has extended conditional relief for onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks. The Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has said he is prepared to act even without the legislation.
Saylor, whose company Strategy started buying bitcoin in 2020, maintains that this style of rulemaking delivers the regulation crypto firms actually need, with no statute necessary.
“We have an administration willing to modernize financial markets. We should use the next two years to put better financial products into people’s hands,” Saylor wrote.
He added: “Let the Digital Assets industry innovate rapidly in a free market and create the greatest possible value for the U.S. and global economy.”
The provisions he was happy to lose
His position has a second dimension. Saylor said certain proposals baked into the act would not have benefited the crypto space in the first place. The example he pointed to was the restriction on paying customers for holding payment stablecoins.
That point deserves a closer look. For years the industry’s most prominent figures treated the Clarity Act as a straightforward yes-or-no proposition, yet the text came with trade-offs, and Saylor now casts its collapse as sidestepping a bad bargain rather than forfeiting a good one.
The road to the 49-50 vote
Last month President Donald Trump pressed lawmakers to get the bill through, and the push helped spur a bitcoin rally. Republicans, however, had spent months accusing Democrats of intentionally stalling it, and Tuesday’s 49-50 result confirmed the deadlock.
Even with the bill stuck, the SEC and CFTC are moving forward with rulemaking of their own. What Saylor’s optimism glosses over is whether that agency-by-agency approach can outlast a change in administration, and that is precisely the reason a statute is worth having at all.
For the time being, the bitcoin treasury pioneer is wagering that two years of a supportive White House is worth more than a law he never fully liked.