But elsewhere, another sign of hope emerged in a Wednesday letter from Sen. Ron Wyden to Senate leadership that the Oregon Democrat supported the way the previous legislation handled the legal protections for developers — specifically the section on Clarity known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, which would ensure that crypto developers would not be treated under transmittal client assets if they did not handle federal client assets as money. The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has made the preservation of the BRCA a top goal in the Clarity negotiations.
Although some of the crypto industry’s D.C. insiders had begun to privately express uncertainty about the Clarity Act’s survival, the effort has yet to meet its fatal deadline of being completed before the summer congressional recess and the shift of attention to the fall midterm elections.
The Senate calendar includes three remaining weeks in July and the first week of August. However, the process of advancing the legislation could take a few days of that time, meaning there is little runway left for a start in 2026. And there is some concern that a defense spending bill could also complicate the chamber’s bandwidth.
The U.S. House of Representatives would also have to approve the Senate’s version of Clarity before it could become law, so the process would await action from a House that has been nearly paralyzed by Republican infighting. And it would then go to President Donald Trump’s desk for a signature to make it law, although the president has refused to sign another popular piece of legislation — the Senate’s bipartisan housing bill — as he insists Congress needs to prioritize his demands for new voting rules.
