This Could Make or Break CLARITY in 2026

On Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 2:15 p.m. ET, the Senate will hold its cloture vote on the CLARITY Act.

We’ve been building up to this moment since the bill originally passed the House of Representatives in July of last year.

Much of the market is worried that if cloture fails, the bill fails. And the price of crypto assets will plummet. If it passes … the opposite.

The anxiety is high going into next week.

But the reality is more nuanced.

If CLARITY stalls, the market isn’t doomed. Instead, digital assets will turn to the two most important regulators guiding them forward—the SEC and CFTC.

Let me walk you through it.

What Cloture Actually Is

First, the mechanics of cloture.

Majority Leader Thune called for a motion on Aug. 8. The Senate is required to vote on the motion on the second day of session after the motion gets filed.

The motion took place just before the Senate left town for its August recess. Which means the second day of session falls on Sept. 15, shortly after Congress returns to Washington, D.C.

Cloture is not a vote on the bill. It’s a vote on whether the Senate will proceed to a vote on the bill.

Said another way, passing cloture means 60 senators believe the text is close enough that floor time won’t be wasted. It’s a question of whether the remaining loose ends are minor enough to tie up on the floor.

Republicans hold 53 seats. Two Republicans, Josh Hawley and Rand Paul, are expected to vote no. Which means the act needs at least nine Democrats to cross party lines.

But before we get into whether those votes exist, there’s another detail worth knowing.

Failing cloture is not a death sentence. We saw the GENIUS Act fail cloture on May 8, 2025, falling short by 12 votes. Then, 11 days later, cloture passed 66-32. Nearly one month after that, the Senate passed the bill.

If the CLARITY Act clears cloture, it’ll likely pass the Senate within weeks. But if the bill gets to that stage, there’s one more hurdle.

The House of Representatives has decided to cut the final two weeks of votes in September to allow representatives to head back to their home districts to campaign full-time.

That matters because CLARITY will need to make a move back to the House of Representatives before it hits the president’s desk.

This is a newer obstacle, and one that ends up pushing any passage in the House to Nov. 9 at the earliest, which is when the post-election “lame-duck” session begins.

But that’s not even the biggest issue ahead …

The Elephant in the Room

Ethics remains the main issue.

We covered this topic in April’s Trump’s Crypto Sideshow, May’s Ring The Bell, and July’s Will Crypto Bend the Knee of Trump.

To briefly summarize: The president’s involvement in some corners of the industry has raised eyebrows. As a result, Democrats are up in arms over ethics language for CLARITY. And despite this being a make-or-break issue, there’s still no agreement.

Senate Democrats will not cross party lines and supply the needed votes without language they approve on ethics.

Full stop.

The issue is relevant right now because Trump disclosed roughly $1.2 billion in crypto income for 2025, with more than $500 million tied to his family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial.

This disclosure was made well after the Democrats began pushing on ethics. It only gave the debate more oxygen.

These are just the facts.

In late July, Sens. Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego finalized a bipartisan ethics compromise. The compromise was sent to the White House on July 30, about a week and a half before the Senate left for recess.

The White House’s response since July 30: Silence.

Gallego has said he’s received no point-by-point answer, and he put it bluntly: “If they’re not engaging, it’s telling me that they don’t want this to happen.”

Tillis was even more direct: “If there’s no interest in the White House in trying to bridge the gap on the ethics language, it is going to fail.”

If CLARITY is ever going to pass, an ethics compromise must be found. And the time to do that is no longer measured in weeks or days, but hours.

The good news is that the compromise is said to be under review by the president’s counsel. There are also discussions happening on the remaining loose ends.

The ethics language looks poised to be shared at the final hour.

There are a lot of moving pieces, and anything could still happen. But there’s reason enough to still be optimistic on CLARITY in 2026.

That said, there is a Plan B.

The Fallback Plan

If CLARITY stalls, for whatever reason, the industry will look to its fallback plan.

The White House, SEC, and CFTC are prepared to move forward without Congress. They’ve been quietly proving it for a year:

• The joint SEC-CFTC harmonization statement and 24/7-markets roundtable (September 2025)

• The DTCC no-action letter blessing tokenized DTC-custodied assets (December 2025)
• CFTC’s Crypto Sprint: spot crypto on regulated futures exchanges, the first leveraged spot product, stablecoins as clearing collateral
• The Franklin Templeton letter blessing blockchain shareholder records (August 2026)
• Proposed Regulation Crypto Assets (August 2026)
• The transfer-agent rewrite letting a blockchain be the legal ownership record (Sept. 1)

Even as CLARITY’s future looks more and more uncertain, Project Crypto—the initiative to bring American finance onchain—has moved forward.

In fact, SEC Chairman Atkins has said in plain English that the SEC “has ample room to maneuver” without Congress. The Commission stands ready to write market-structure rules under existing law if the legislative path closes.

And with the Nasdaq just announcing a $100 million investment in the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, which also issues tokenized equities via xStocks, we can see the smart money knows what’s about to happen as well.

The Nasdaq and NYSE thought they could protect their current moat. But with the SEC and CFTC getting ready to move fast, the Nasdaq sees the writing on the wall. And it’s buying its way into the brave new world.

If CLARITY fails, expect to see the innovation exemption, the rule that legalizes tokenized stocks for U.S. persons, get released in the days to weeks that follow.

The industry would like CLARITY. It would certainly help.

But make no mistake: The trend of tokenization is moving forward with or without the bill.

Game on.

Your Pulse on Crypto,

Ben Lilly

Editor, Chain of Thought