CLARITY Act Is Still Stuck. Scaramucci Says Trump Memecoins and One Ethics Fight Killed It.

The CLARITY Act cleared the House in July 2025, 294 votes to 134. Sixteen months later it's still not law. And the thing sitting on its chest isn't the bank lobby or SEC turf wars. According to Anthony Scaramucci, it's a memecoin.

The SkyBridge founder said this week that the Trump family's token ventures derailed the market structure bill. He also pointed at the ethics restrictions fight as the second knife, and he was careful to spread the blame across both parties. Fair enough. But the interesting part isn't the accusation. It's that he's basically right, and the people who should be angriest about it are the ones who keep defending the tokens.

What actually happened

Let's run the timeline, because the timeline is the argument.

January 17, 2025. $TRUMP goes live two days before the inauguration. Roughly 80% of supply sits with Trump-affiliated entities on a vesting schedule. The token rips, then bleeds. It's down well over 80% from its peak and it has never come close to recovering. World Liberty Financial, the family-linked DeFi venture, sold hundreds of millions in tokens of its own. Then came American Bitcoin and a pile of smaller launches.

July 2025. The House passes CLARITY with a real bipartisan margin. The bill sets out who regulates what. It draws a line between securities and commodities, gives the CFTC a bigger chair at the table, and builds a disclosure path for projects that want to register instead of hiding. For an industry that's spent a decade begging for rules, this was the rules.

Then the Senate got it.

And that's where the ethics language showed up. Democrats wanted a provision barring the president and senior officials from issuing or profiting from digital assets while in office. Republicans called it a poison pill. Negotiations stalled. Scaramucci's read is that both sides dug in, and he's not wrong about that either.

The bill is still there. It's just not moving.

Who wins, who loses

Here's my take, and it's not going to make me popular in either camp.

The memecoin defense was always a losing trade. Not morally. Strategically. If you spend two years telling senators that tokens are serious financial infrastructure, then launch a token with a 20% float and insider allocations, you've handed your opponents the only exhibit they need. No staffer has to argue that crypto is a casino. They just pull up the chart.

So who benefits from the stall? The incumbents. Coinbase, Circle, and the regulated exchanges keep operating under the same murky rules they've already learned to price in. they've the lawyers. they've the compliance departments. A stalled bill is a moat, and moats are great if you're already inside one.

The losers are the small teams. The two-person shop building a perps protocol in Lisbon can't afford a six-figure legal opinion on whether its token is a security. They need the bright line. They're not getting it.

And here's the part that drives me up a wall. there's no privacy provision in CLARITY. No section on zero-knowledge proofs. Nothing on self-custody anonymity. Nothing that would stop the next round of rulemaking from treating a stealth address as probable cause. The bill was about market structure, sure. But market structure without privacy defaults just builds a cleaner surveillance pipe.

If it's not private by default, it's surveillance by design. That line gets me yelled at. It's still true.

So we're about to spend another year arguing about whether a president's family should be allowed to launch a token, while the actual architecture question, the one about whether ordinary people can transact without a permanent public record of everything they do, gets punted again.

Ask yourself this. If the bill passes in 2027 with the ethics language stripped and no privacy protections, what did the industry actually win? A registration form and a longer paper trail.

And if it dies? Then the SEC keeps governing by enforcement, the CFTC keeps improvising, and every project with a real privacy feature stays one subpoena away from a legal bill it can't pay.

Scaramucci is right that the memecoins helped sink this thing. He's also right that both sides share blame. But the deeper failure is that the whole negotiation was about who gets to sell tokens, not about what those tokens do to the people using them.

Fungibility is the whole point. A coin that carries a public history of everyone who touched it isn't money. It's a receipt with your name on it. The chain remembers everything. That should worry you.

The takeaway

The CLARITY Act didn't die from bank lobbying or Senate scheduling. It got stuck because the industry's loudest mascots became its worst witnesses, and because the people writing the bill never once treated privacy as non-negotiable.

Financial privacy isn't a crime. It's a prerequisite for freedom. Until a market structure bill says that out loud, in a section with a number, the industry is just negotiating the terms of its own audit trail.

Watch the Senate Banking Committee calendar in the first quarter of 2027. If a revised CLARITY draft appears with the ethics language softened and nothing added on zero-knowledge or self-custody, you'll know exactly which side won. And it won't be the two-person team in Lisbon.