Bitcoin Rallied Through a Failed Clarity Act Vote. Gary Cardone Still Has Bids at $66K.

The Clarity Act's cloture vote failed, and Bitcoin rallied anyway. That one sequence says more about where this market sits than anything a senator said on the floor.

Bad News, Green Candles

Gary Cardone wasn't surprised. The co-founder of Chargebacks911 has been trading this cycle with a specific read, and it goes like this: the market stopped pricing regulatory news as a binary. Bad headline, lower price. That was the old reflex. Somewhere over the last two quarters that wiring got ripped out and replaced with something that responds to flows instead of headlines.

His explanation is boring in the best way. When capital is rotating into AI and Bitcoin at the same time, a failed procedural vote in Washington doesn't move the marginal buyer. It's noise against a structural bid.

But that bid has been weaker than the price chart suggests. Bitcoin's push toward $126K stalled out. Cardone calls it what it was, a weak push, not a breakout. And here's the part most people gloss over. A stalled push at $126K while AI names rip isn't a coincidence. It's the same dollar making a choice, and for a stretch there, it kept choosing compute.

So Cardone did something most people in this space won't admit they do. He parked capital somewhere boring and let it pay him in bitcoin.

That somewhere is STRC, a preferred instrument he's been holding to collect a yield he converts into coin. By his own numbers, that's roughly 10 to 12 BTC flowing in from dividends. He isn't buying the top. He isn't waiting for a dip that may never arrive. He's running a machine that accumulates while he sleeps.

He also compares preferreds across liquidity, yield, and tax treatment, which is the part of this conversation that separates operators from tourists. Most retail never runs that math. They just buy spot and pray.

What Actually Changed

A catalyst disappeared. That's the concrete damage from the failed vote. Anyone sitting in cash waiting for regulatory clarity just learned clarity isn't arriving on schedule, and the floor underneath them is higher than they assumed.

That's a repricing of political risk, and it cuts both ways. The upside is that Bitcoin no longer needs permission to move. The downside is that the excuse is gone. If the price holds through a failed bill, then every future selloff has to be explained by something real.

Cardone's framing of Wall Street is where this gets interesting. He treats the new guard not as invaders but as the natural next layer. Institutions don't care about ideology. They care about spread. Bitcoin-fiat arbitrage is a business, and it's a business that needs the same thing every other market needs, tight plumbing and reliable settlement.

And that's why the AI rotation matters more than the price action suggests. The compute layer needs a payment rail. If agents have wallets, somebody has to hold the keys, and somebody has to clear the transaction. Bitcoin's role in that world isn't as a meme. It's as final settlement.

The AI-crypto Venn diagram is getting thicker. Cardone is basically describing the same thing from the trading desk side that builders describe from the protocol side. Capital flows toward whichever asset clears fastest and cheapest. Right now that fight is live.

He's also blunt about something the industry hates hearing. The $1M to $5M price targets are a bad pitch. Not because they're impossible, but because they ignore Bitcoin's real supply and what a realistic market cap actually looks like at those levels. Do the multiplication and the number stops feeling like a forecast. It starts feeling like a sales deck.

That kind of honesty is rare and it's why his positioning is worth studying more than his price calls.

Where This Goes

Cardone thinks $75K holds. He's got bids sitting at $66K and $68K, and he'd genuinely welcome one more retest of the low $70s, because that's where his machine loads up.

Read that again. A guy who expects support to hold still wants a lower print. That's not a contradiction. That's what conviction looks like when you've already built the income stream and you're just waiting for the next entry.

So what's the trade here? Watch the $75K line. If it breaks, $68K is the next real shelf, and $66K is the backstop. If it holds, the failed vote becomes a footnote and the market starts asking harder questions about what actually drives the next leg. My money is on flows, not legislation.

The bigger shift is behavioral. Bitcoin is becoming a yield instrument for people who already have capital, and a settlement layer for machines that don't have bank accounts. Those are two very different adoption stories running in parallel, and both of them are real.

What mass adoption actually looks like isn't a headline. It's someone collecting dividends in BTC without thinking about it, and a software agent paying another software agent in sats without a human in the loop. Boring, invisible, relentless.

That's the version of this that wins. Not the one with the loudest prediction.