For nearly two years, the crypto industry's Washington strategy rested on a single word: clarity.
Pass a market-structure law, the thinking went, and the rest would follow. That strategy hit a wall—and now the industry's focus has shifted from Congress to federal regulators.
Last week, the Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act , the sweeping market-structure bill more than a year in the making, in a 49-50 procedural vote that fell well short of the 60 needed. Democrats voted against it, with three Republicans joining them, after months of negotiations foundered on ethics provisions tied to President Donald Trump's crypto ventures. Lead architect Sen. Cynthia Lummis called the effort all but dead for the year.
But the bill's collapse didn't stop the rulemaking—it redirected it. Within 48 hours, federal regulatory agencies moved to fill the vacuum themselves.
The SEC went first and most visibly, with Chairman Paul Atkins directly addressing the Clarity Act's failure as he introduced a new " innovation exemption " for digital assets. The framework lets qualifying venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks on-chain without registering as national securities exchanges. It was the clearest signal yet that the agency intends to set crypto policy through its own authority rather than wait for lawmakers.
The CFTC, not to be left out, has been moving on parallel tracks. CFTC staff issued a no-action position letting passive software providers —including crypto wallet apps—give users access to regulated derivatives without registering as introducing brokers. The agency also sent a broader crypto-markets rulemaking to the White House for review, though the text isn't yet public.
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The upshot is a regulatory landscape being built rule by rule rather than by a single act of Congress. Industry figures have largely made peace with it.
Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith said the sector is " now looking to regulators for guidance ," calling it "the more viable path forward right now."
The catch is that agency rulemaking is slower to write, easier to challenge in court, and easier for a future administration to unwind than a law.
After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the SEC, then chaired by Gary Gensler, was crypto’s most hated villain. Throughout the Joe Biden administration, the agency ran a “regulation by enforcement” campaign that sent chills down every crypto executive's spine. A market structure law was meant to prevent those days from ever returning.
But at the moment the industry will have to take what it can get. And, for now, what it gets are rules of the road delivered by previously hostile regulators instead of arguably the most industry-friendly Congress yet.
Whether those rules hold is the story of the months and potentially years ahead.