Clarity Act gives law enforcement the tools it needs for decentralized finance

Last month, a major U.S.-based digital asset company’s compliance team discovered that more than $200 million in stablecoins were en route to North Korea. They had eight hours and the technical ability to freeze the transaction, yet reportedly did nothing. Why? Because America’s current laws left them exposed to company-killing levels of civil litigation if their judgement proved wrong.

I have watched this scenario play out before. The industry wanted to help out. The will was there, but the legal cover was not.

This is the reality facing industry and law enforcement today, and it is exactly what a decade of congressional inaction has produced. The Clarity Act would change that.

We  have spent years prosecuting cases that touched the digital asset space, and the argument we hear most often is that robust enforcement and a thriving industry are fundamentally incompatible. That has always been a false choice. Clear, consistently enforced rules are not the enemy of free markets but their foundation.

What has plagued the digital asset industry is not too many regulations but too little of the right kind: specific, enforceable, and built around the realities of the technology rather than the assumptions of regulators who never bothered to understand the issues. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) understood this long before most of her colleagues.........

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