Compound Founder Robert Leshner: Everyone Loses
Robert Leshner, founder of the Compound protocol and head of Superstate, stated that the failure of the Clear Act on the day of voting made everyone a loser, as partisan struggles overshadowed common sense: the boundaries between tokens and securities remain unclear; entrepreneurs will still choose to set up and raise funds abroad; investors receive no additional information or protection; developers do not gain extra security from decentralized systems; banks still face stablecoins with payable yields; and public officials have no ethical barriers in crypto businesses. He noted that the most painful aspect is for those who have worked long-term in both houses and both parties, and that the light of American leadership has dimmed a bit, then wrote "keep moving forward."
The Senate's motion to end debate on the review failed with 49 votes in favor and 50 against, falling short of the required 60 votes by 11 votes. The House passed it in July 2025 with 294 votes in favor and 134 against. Four Republican votes opposed it, and no Democrats supported it. The sticking points were ethical clauses and stablecoin rewards: projects related to the president's family disclosed about $1.4 billion in revenue, and the weekend text added prohibitions on issuing tokens while in office, major holdings disposal, and state attorney general prosecution rights, yet it was still criticized for not mandating a full divestiture; banks are concerned that platform yields will siphon off deposits, with the authority to halt trading given to the Treasury Department.
Leshner's list corresponds to the voting structure. Without codified law, the issuance of tokens and staking continues to rely on the discretion of the SEC and CFTC; Genius has paved the way for stablecoins, but the reward clauses remain in a vacuum, with banks losing pricing power over deposits and platforms losing national rules. Offshore registration and fundraising are essentially arbitrage due to the absence of U.S. market structure, and the failure to reach 60 votes has written arbitrage into the next session as a default. The probability of the bill becoming law this year has dropped from about 29% to about 6.5%. Bitcoin has fallen to $76,000, and Coinbase is down over 8%.
His company deals with on-chain treasury bonds and tokenized securities, directly straddling the line of "security or commodity." The bill was originally intended to strengthen the commodity side, providing issuers like him with a federal map; after its failure, the map remains an enforcement memo. "Onwards" is not optimistic but acknowledges that this session does not have enough time to gather seven more Democratic votes.
In market mechanisms, buyers are licensed exchanges and tokenized issuers seeking certainty, while sellers are senators who write ethics into veto power. This is a legislative standstill driven by the electoral calendar. Funds are retreating from legislative premiums to offshore entities and the rule texts of the two committees; beneficiaries are issuers with existing stablecoin laws and offshore registrations, while those under pressure are intermediary stocks treating the U.S. market structure as a valuation story, and congressional aides who write two years of lobbying as sunk costs.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Leshner has been operating on the edge of U.S. securities law from Compound governance to Superstate treasury bond tokens. If the Clear Act had passed, his security-type tokens could have stood on the commodity side or exemption side; since it did not pass, the products remain within enforcement interpretations. "Everyone loses" is a founder's rhetoric: banks, developers, investors, and ethical oversight are all written into the same failed list, turning partisan disputes from policy differences into public losses. The real winners not mentioned in the post are offshore registrations and trading platforms that have adapted to dual enforcement.
The capital path is to turn congressional failure into the next round of product descriptions: if the U.S. does not provide a map, then issuance is placed in jurisdictions that can provide a map, and then stablecoin yields are brought into U.S. retail. Banks want to ban rewards, platforms want to issue rewards, and with neither having legislation, they continue to use the market to grab deposits. The statement that investors "have no more information" is true and also serves as the reason for issuers like him to continue selling under private placement memorandums.
The analogy is not the 1933 Securities Act, but rather the multiple procedural failures of commodity futures modernization, where exchanges live by interpretive orders. The industry has retreated from lobbying for national licenses back to regulatory arbitrage. Leshner says the light has dimmed a bit, and what has dimmed is Washington's pricing power, not on-chain transaction volume.
Structural judgments belong to a regulatory vacuum elongated by political ethics. The mechanism is: the 60 votes tie the market structure to the first family's ledger, and once tied, it cannot pass; if it cannot pass, the boundaries between securities and commodities continue to be drawn by the chairman's office. In places where boundaries are unclear, products migrate, and lobbying depreciates.
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