This seems like a major failure to deliver from the Trump administration and unlikely to get done at all now?
'Sen. Angela Alsobrooks was wrapping up her holiday break this January when she noticed a message on her phone. It was a voicemail from Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong, and it was about three-minutes long.
The Maryland Democrat was a key negotiator over a landmark bill meant to usher digital assets into wider use. The two had been talking for months. When conversations with Alsobrooks and other lawmakers grew tense, the CEO could speak in a tone that some people working on the bill felt was inappropriate when talking to U.S. senators.
Armstrong, crypto’s highest-profile advocate on the Hill, admonished the senator for changes she was pushing that could have hit the brakes on Coinbase’s ability to pay interest-like rewards on digital tokens. Banks, fearing it would lure away customer deposits, were fighting furiously to ban the practice.
His message to the senator in the voicemail, according to people familiar with it: If you give banks an inch, they will take a mile.
Less than two weeks later, the Coinbase CEO shocked his own industry by pulling his support for an early version of the bill just as it was poised to advance. “We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” he posted on X before a key Senate vote on Jan. 15.
That bill, called the Clarity Act, collapsed this week after months of protracted negotiations when senators officially voted it down. It marked a spectacular choke by an industry that had just recently begun reveling in its new lobbying clout, with President Trump in its corner.
The blame game began immediately. Some crypto executives and lawmakers pointed to Democratic resistance after Trump’s massive crypto profits, disclosed in June, raised fresh ethics concerns about the president’s businesses. The war in Iran, inflation and the backlash against data centers and rogue artificial-intelligence agents all became bigger priorities for lawmakers as 2026 dragged on. Others said the industry squandered its chance to close the deal earlier in the year, before any of those forces gathered steam.
Armstrong, the CEO of the largest U.S. crypto exchange, was at the center of it all and exercised the crypto industry’s sway over the bill as its de facto leader in the Washington fight. Few other people, aside from Trump, had as much influence as Armstrong, according to people involved in the negotiations. He visited Washington 13 times from the 2024 election to the September vote, and his lobbying team for months held multiple weekly calls with industry members to discuss tactics on the bill, an extraordinary level of engagement for the company and its CEO.
The 43-year-old billionaire could effectively veto portions he didn’t like—and he did, the people said, frustrating an already complex process. Some in the industry backed his hard-line stance.
“We had a lot of momentum in January,” said Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, which supported the bill. “Then one group in our industry kind of shot ourselves in the foot.”
Coinbase COIN 11.66%increase; up pointing triangle
has said Armstrong’s decision to pull his support in January was in the best interest of the crypto industry, and that it had identified multiple parts of the bill that were problematic.
“We repeatedly took compromises in order to keep the coalition together and move the legislation forward,” said Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer, in a statement.
A power broker emerges
Armstrong, who co-founded Coinbase in 2012, emerged in 2024 as a major political fundraiser and donor for Republicans, helping make crypto a constituency to be reckoned with.
After Trump’s inauguration, Armstrong quickly carved out a role for himself lobbying on crypto legislation.
His first test was the Genius Act, a bill to regulate stablecoins—a type of digital asset pegged to real-world currencies, like dollars. The Coinbase chief cut a striking figure, bald and dressed in navy suits, when he visited lawmakers on Capitol Hill to push for the bill. It ended up garnering significant Democratic support, and Trump signed it into law last summer.
It was a major victory for the industry, and showcased Armstrong’s new status as a crypto power broker.
Then came the Clarity Act.
The bill was intended to be a sister to Genius, but far more ambitious in scope, addressing crypto’s many subindustries. After facing regulatory crackdowns and prosecutions during the Biden years, crypto companies wanted a permanent framework on the books to ensure they could roll out new products without fear that when the political winds changed, bureaucrats would come down hard on them once again. A new law would also move crypto further into the mainstream of the financial system.'
Full paywall free article-
So it has been for the man's entire life. So it has been for the entire life of this nation.
Literally who?
Opinion disregarded.
Okay so the entire article is about layer two problems.
You don't understand how America works. If the government passes a resolution to ban assault rifles, what happens? There's a run on the assault rifles for the next 6 months until the bill finally passes, then they use 3D printers to make pistols that are more lethal than the kinds of rifle that was banned. And they can't just ban all private firearms because then everyone supporting the ban would be dead.
Bitcoin works the same way.
The failure of the Act being passed does not seem to have adversely impacted Bitcoin price- arguably Bitcoin might be advantaged by the disadvantaging of all the shitcoins and 'stablecoins'?
It's all lines of code. It's unregulatable.
How can China ban its use as a MoE then?
How have nearly all the democracies effectively crushed its use as a MoE by imposing crippling taxation recording and payment obligations upon any MoE use?
The bankers have succeeded in restricting use of Bitcoin as a MoE both directly in autocracies and indirectly via malicious tax code interpretation in the so called liberal western democracies.
Nobody can challenge the Zionist petrodollar MoE hegemony without being attacked by the Zionists puppet petrodollar empire.
Not even Bitcoiners.
Trump is a shitcoiner using the Libertarians as voting fodder.
MAGA is a conmans cover for his own sell out of your freedoms.
Go ahead lol. If the US is the only country where Bitcoin becomes mainstream then we win.
Tyranny breeds poverty. Liberty breeds wealth. You are enabling a situation where the US hoards all of the money.
Bitcoin is not mainstream as a MoE even in the US.
The tax recording and payment obligations to use BTC legally as a MoE impose such an obstacle as to make its use legally as a MoE impractical.
And that obstruction has not and will not be removed by Trump.
He has never even promised to remove it.
He is owned by the Zionist owners of the petrodollar empire.
Bitcoin as a regulated, KYCed and taxed speculative commodity plaything is not liberty or freedom- it leaves you trapped in the Zionists fiat based monetary and financial system of exploitation.
Yes. So we have to reform the system to remove those obligations, then practical use becomes legal.
Every bit of liberty that mankind has was once illegal.
Because the obstruction is coming from half the US population that supports taxation on income. Of course Trump himself can't solve the problem as one person in one government office.
What he can do, and has been doing, is blast dog whistles about a communist insurrection that requires the American people to prepare for total war on US soil. Bitcoin will be legal and mainstream in the aftermath.
Yes. So we have to reform the system to remove those obligations, then practical use becomes legal.
If Trump removes the CG tax obligations that have been imposed upon Bitcoin MoE I will retract the assertion that he is owned by the Zionist war criminals.
It's just not gonna happen.
Trump has had unparalleled power to remove that obstruction but he has done nothing to remove it. He is owned by the Zionist war criminals who own the Fed Res.
The Clarity Act situation looks like a major setback for the Trump administration's crypto agenda, but I wouldn't say the legislation is permanently dead yet.
The important point is that this wasn't simply a case of Democrats blocking a Trump-backed bill. The Senate vote on September 15 was 49–50, well below the 60 votes needed to move the legislation forward. All Democrats voted against it, but four Republicans also voted no. That suggests the problem was broader than just partisan opposition.
What makes the failure particularly notable is how much political and industry support the bill appeared to have earlier in the year. Trump had made crypto a major part of his policy agenda, and the crypto industry had invested heavily in lobbying for comprehensive market-structure legislation.
The negotiations nevertheless broke down over several issues. One was the treatment of crypto rewards and the effect on banks and deposits. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also withdrew his support for an earlier version of the legislation, arguing that the bill had become unacceptable to the industry. According to the reporting, that created additional friction among crypto companies that had previously been working toward the same legislative goal.
Trump's own crypto interests then became another major obstacle. Democrats argued that the legislation did not contain sufficient restrictions on the president and other federal officials dealing in digital assets. Republicans made changes to the bill in an attempt to address those concerns, including additional enforcement mechanisms, but those changes were not enough to produce the votes required.
So the bigger story isn't simply that "Trump couldn't pass a crypto bill." It's that the coalition behind the bill fractured at exactly the point where bipartisan support was necessary.
The bill technically isn't impossible to revive. Senator Thom Tillis changed his vote to no for procedural reasons, preserving the possibility of another vote. But with the midterm elections approaching and the Senate already failing to reach the 60-vote threshold, the remaining legislative window in 2026 is very narrow.
In the meantime, the administration can continue changing crypto policy through the SEC and CFTC. That can provide some regulatory direction, but it isn't the same thing as Congress passing a durable statutory framework.
My takeaway is that the September vote represents a serious failure to deliver the comprehensive legislative framework that the administration and the crypto industry had been pursuing. Whether it becomes a temporary setback or the end of the current effort will depend on whether lawmakers can rebuild a bipartisan coalition after the election.