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In May, the crypto industry won big as the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act. It passed largely along party lines, but two Democrats with crypto-friendly records, Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), broke with their colleagues to support the bill. Last September, Alsobrooks and Gallego partnered with 10 other Senate Democrats to articulate their wishlist for the Clarity Act; their demands are more permissive than the hardline anti-crypto politics of Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and the party’s progressive wing. However, they did pay lip service to consumer protection, strong regulatory agencies, and a provision to limit the Trump family’s crypto-powered corruption. 

Unfortunately, the Clarity Act will not achieve these goals. Instead, as Senator Warren observed, “Nothing made it into this bill that wasn’t approved by the crypto industry.”

The legislation would hand regulation of most digital assets to a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) captured by private interests. The CFTC spent 2025 dropping cases against crypto companies at the behest of acting chair Caroline Pham. Then, in December, Pham left to become Chief Legal Officer of the crypto firm MoonPay. Now, the Commission’s board, which was designed to have a bipartisan membership of five, is currently chaired by one Trump loyalist who slashed a fifth of its already paltry staff. It’s this office which would have to manage a workload that one former CFTC lawyer has claimed would be equivalent to handling the behemoth Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is better equipped to police the industry, has fared poorly over the past 18 months amidst an........

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