Kirsten Gillibrand said that the US Senate had to address lawmakers potentially getting “rich off of these industries because of their insider status“ before any vote on the CLARITY Act.
US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said lawmakers working towards passage of a digital asset market structure bill likely need to meet three conditions before the chamber could vote on the legislation.
Speaking at the Consensus conference in Miami on Wednesday, Gillibrand said she considered addressing consumer protection, illicit finance, and ethics provisions essential before any potential vote on the CLARITY Act. She said that if Congress were to consider those issues, as well as combine the draft of the market structure bill with the version already passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee and ensure ethics language, lawmakers could have a vote “before the August recess,” which begins Aug. 10.
“There will be no one voting for this bill if we don’t have an ethics provision,” said Gillibrand. “Because the truth is, is that we cannot allow members of Congress, senior administration officials, presidents or vice presidents, to get rich off of these industries because of their insider status. It is the worst form of pay for play.”
Although Gillibrand did not explicitly mention US President Donald Trump by name, his ties to the crypto industry, through the launch of his memecoin, his family’s crypto business World Liberty Financial, and other dealings with the industry have come under scrutiny as lawmakers consider the CLARITY Act.
Last week, senators on the banking committee announced a deal on stablecoin yield which could allow the market structure bill to advance, but did not address language on public officials’ potential conflicts of interest.
Crypto industry leaders and advocates have been weighing in on the market structure bill since the stablecoin yield compromise was announced. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said on Tuesday that lawmakers likely needed to address the bill in the next two weeks before it became muddied by issues amid the US midterm elections.
“There’s a window of opportunity, and that’s always important that you act when you find that window of opportunity,” said Summer Mersinger, a former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and CEO of the Blockchain Association, in a separate panel on the market structure bill at Consensus on Wednesday.
“That doesn’t mean the window’s not going to open again. You just never know what’s going to happen in the intervening events that maybe will bring people back to this issue after August recess,” she said.
Bill awaits markup in Senate Banking Committee
As of Wednesday, the Senate Banking Committee had not rescheduled a markup on the market structure bill after postponing the event in January. At the time, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the exchange could not support the legislation as written, leading to other crypto companies and advocates speaking out against certain provisions in the bill on decentralized finance, stablecoins and tokenized equities.
Traders on prediction markets platform Polymarket see a 65% chance of the CLARITY Act being signed into law by the end of 2026. On Kalshi, traders currently put the probabilty that the bill will become law before August at 49%.
