Key Facts

• The Clarity Act faces a difficult path through the Senate, with shrinking legislative time and unresolved political concerns, including ethics provisions, illicit finance, and limited Senate floor time, which have led Polymarket to estimate the odds of passage by the end of 2026 at 48%, down from 70% in mid-May.
• Jefferies analysts, led by Andrew Moss, warn that failure to pass the Clarity Act before the August recess could push the bill out to next year, or even later, if Democrats flip the Senate in November, potentially prolonging regulatory uncertainty.
• The Clarity Act is considered the crypto industry's most important market structure bill, as it would establish clear rules for when digital assets are regulated as securities by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or commodities by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
• Passage of the bill would provide a durable regulatory framework for banks, asset managers, and exchanges to expand tokenization, custody, staking, lending, and other blockchain-based services, potentially unlocking broader institutional adoption and investment in the sector.
• Jefferies expects elevated volatility in crypto tokens and blockchain-related equities, including Circle (CRCL), Coinbase (COIN), and Bullish (BLSH), as the bill's prospects become clearer, with the bank also anticipating that passage would accelerate tokenized securities and broaden crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) offerings beyond bitcoin and ether.