Voting on the CLARITY Act in the U.S. Senate has concluded, failing to reach the required 60 votes for passage, and the bill has not been approved
The voting on the CLARITY Act in the U.S. Senate has concluded, with the final result standing at 50 votes in favor and 50 votes against, failing to reach the required 60 votes for passage, and the bill has not been approved.
This result confirms the earlier prediction by investment bank TD Cowen, which had assessed the probability of the bill's failure at 60%; it also starkly contrasts with Senator Cynthia Lummis's previous warning that "if the bill fails, America is finished," and the optimistic expectations expressed by House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, who both stated it would "certainly pass."
In light of previous developments, this vote occurred shortly after Senate Democrats proposed a counter-proposal, which still did not restore the criminal safe harbor provisions for BRCA-related developers; even if the bill had passed, its protections for developers would have been significantly narrowed compared to the independent version initially sought by the industry, and now even this weakened version has failed to pass.
Following the bill's failure, there has been a reaction within the industry—Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov commented that "the CLARITY (bill) has failed, and now DeFi needs to win through its own level of adoption," suggesting that DeFi should emulate the "Uber model" by expanding user scale to force regulatory adaptation, rather than relying on clear legislation.
From a market mechanism perspective, the failure of the bill means that the previously widespread expectation of "regulatory clarity within the year" for the U.S. digital asset industry has fallen through, and the risk appetite that had accumulated based on favorable regulatory conditions may face a phase of retraction; for exchanges, custodians, and protocol development teams that had relied on the narrative of "regulatory certainty coming soon" to advance compliance layouts, fundraising, or product launch plans, their timelines and resource allocations will need to be readjusted. Who benefits: leading institutions with mature compliance frameworks that do not rely entirely on new federal regulations will be relatively unaffected by this vote result; who is under pressure: small and medium-sized projects that had hoped to lower compliance costs and accelerate entry into the U.S. market after the bill's passage will continue to operate in an environment of regulatory uncertainty, and their pace of fundraising and product expansion may further slow. Regarding the specific vote count of 50:50, this nearly even result also indicates that there was no overwhelming consensus within both parties on this bill, making it difficult to resubmit for a vote or reach a new bipartisan compromise in the short term.
After the bill failed to pass in this vote, its future direction—whether to revise the terms and resubmit for a vote, or as previously indicated by TD Cowen's research report, to be procedurally delayed until after the midterm elections—currently lacks further clarification in public information.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
In U.S. congressional history, it is not uncommon for regulatory legislation involving emerging industries to stall in the Senate due to failing to gather the 60 votes needed for cloture, as seen in previous immigration reform bills and climate legislation attempts that have stopped short of the threshold due to bipartisan disagreements; the struggle over the CLARITY Act and BRCA-related provisions, from passing in the House (with 78 Democratic votes) to the Senate Democrats' counter-proposal weakening developer protections, to the final 50:50 vote that did not pass, illustrates a typical path of a controversial bipartisan legislative effort being pulled back and ultimately failing in Congress.
From the perspective of industry resource investment, the core demand of the crypto industry’s lobbying resources in this round of legislative struggle was to reduce compliance uncertainty costs across states and institutions through unified federal rules; now that this "lobbying capital" has not translated into legislative results, the logic of industry resource allocation is shifting, as Aave founder Kulechov noted, towards a "user scale-driven" approach—redirecting some of the resources previously invested in lobbying and compliance preparation towards product growth and market penetration, attempting to replace the certainty originally hoped for at the legislative level with the established market scale.
Similar historical precedents of "significant regulatory legislation failing in the Senate due to insufficient votes, leading the industry to alternative strategies" include multiple attempts at net neutrality legislation in the 2010s being obstructed in Congress, after which related companies turned to maintaining the status quo through market practices and established business models; it is also similar to the previous processes of medical marijuana legalization, where states took the lead while federal legislation lagged. The current stage of the digital asset industry is transitioning from "betting on federal legislation to resolve regulatory uncertainty at once" to "parallel paths—continuing to lobby while accelerating product adoption."
This essentially represents a typical path obstruction in the "regulatory change" process: the Senate's 60-vote threshold design is meant to prevent a simple majority party from unilaterally passing controversial legislation, which also determines that any bill lacking genuine bipartisan consensus and relying solely on one side's momentum has a high probability of failure. Mechanically, the 50:50 result indicates that neither the Republican side's optimistic promotion nor the Democratic side's proposed weakened counter-proposal managed to bridge the core disagreements between the two parties on issues such as "criminal immunity for developers"; this also confirms the previously mentioned structural tension—civil concessions are relatively easy to achieve, but both parties lack the incentive to compromise on provisions that restrict federal criminal enforcement powers, ultimately leading to the failure of the entire bill without substantial compromise.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
No matter how loud the promotion, it won't bring in 60 votes
Disagreements left until the end lead to the bill's demise
If the legislative path is blocked, the market path continues