The Clarity Act Lost to $200M and a Calendar. Coinbase's Policy Chief Says Regulators Are Next.

The Clarity Act's cloture vote failed this week. That's another market structure bill dead in the Senate, and Coinbase chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad isn't sugarcoating the why. Two forces did the damage. An electoral calendar that swallowed the bill late in the cycle, and roughly $200 million in campaign spending from big banks.

Here's what matters: that $200 million didn't buy a defeat so much as it bought delay. And delay is cheaper than losing outright.

Shirzad's read is blunt. Congress has had its shot, and the real action now shifts to the SEC, the CFTC, and the bank regulators under Paul Atkins. That's a meaningful pivot. Legislation was always the slow lane. Regulation moves faster, at least when the agency heads already agree with you.

He's still running a three-track strategy: legislation, regulation, international. Frankly, only one of those three has real momentum right now, and it isn't the one on Capitol Hill.

The numbers tell the story on the bank side. A $200 million campaign isn't a rounding error, even for an industry that spends billions a year on compliance. Notably, the banks aren't fighting crypto because they think it's going to zero. They're fighting it because stablecoin deposits and tokenized money market funds eat into the one thing they've defended for a century, the deposit base.

From a risk perspective, that's the tell. You don't spend nine figures on a legislative fight you expect to win easily in five years anyway.

So what do you watch now? The SEC's rulemaking calendar and the CFTC's posture on spot markets. Those two agencies can do in 18 months what Congress couldn't do in three years. And keep an eye on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill. Either it gets folded into something bigger or it dies quietly in committee.

Shirzad is right that one failed vote isn't the end of the story. But anyone still betting on Congress to hand crypto clarity before the next election is betting on a body that just showed exactly what it can't do.