Cody Carbone presses crypto agenda as CLARITY Act stalls in senators to move the CLARITY Act forward, but the real fight now is not whether crypto matters. It is whether Congress can write rules that are clear, enforceable, and not dumb as bricks.
- Carbone says crypto can lower costs and speed up payments.
- The CLARITY Act has already cleared the Senate Banking Committee.
- Opposition is building over anti-trafficking safeguards, prediction markets, and CFTC authority.
- Supporters say regulatory clarity could pull more institutions into crypto, though the biggest forecasts still smell a bit like salesmanship.
Cody Carbone, chief executive of The Digital Chamber, used a Senate Banking Committee hearing on affordability to argue that digital assets are not just speculative toys for traders and degens. His point was simple: blockchain-based financial services can help lower costs through faster transactions, lower payment fees, and easier access to financial assets.
That is crypto’s cleanest pitch. Strip away the memes, the price charts, and the nonsense predictions, and what remains is a technology that can move money and assets with less friction than a lot of legacy systems.
Carbone told senators that digital assets can help “introduce competition to traditional payment networks and reduce friction in moving money and assets.” He made that case during a hearing titled The Affordability Agenda, where the politics were bigger than crypto alone. Even so, the issue fit because payment costs, remittances, and settlement speed are exactly where crypto’s usefulness is easiest to explain without leaning on hopium.
That came through in the questioning too. Senator Jim Banks pressed Carbone on international remittances and stablecoins pegged to the U.S. dollar, comparing them with existing payment methods. That is a fair line of inquiry. Stablecoins are crypto tokens designed to track a stable value, usually the dollar, and they are one of the few parts of the crypto stack that can realistically compete with traditional payment rails without asking the public to become their own bank.
Senator John Kennedy took a more measured approach. He said he supported cryptocurrency, but added that digital assets were not the main cause of America’s affordability problems. He is right on that one. Crypto is not going to fix housing costs, groceries, or the broader mess of inflation and policy failures. It can improve some of the plumbing. It cannot, by itself, rescue a broken household budget.
The legislative vehicle is the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, better known as the CLARITY Act. In plain English, the bill is meant to give the U.S. a clearer framework for deciding how digital assets are regulated and which agency gets to oversee what.
That matters because Washington has spent years fighting over whether crypto assets should fall mainly under the SEC or the CFTC, and what obligations exchanges, brokers, and other intermediaries should face. The bill is part of a broader effort to define the market structure for digital assets instead of leaving the industry stuck in regulatory fog and enforcement by ambush.
The Senate Banking Committee has already advanced the bill, so this is no longer a vague “someday maybe” discussion. The next fight is about full Senate consideration, amendments, and whether lawmakers can get a version that survives the usual Washington meat grinder.
That process is not going to be clean.
On June 23, the Alliance to End Human Trafficking (AEHT) sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urging them to revisit Section 604 of the bill. AEHT said the provision incorporates the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act and warned it could make it more difficult for authorities to track financial activity tied to crimes such as human trafficking.
The group wants stronger anti-money laundering protections before the bill moves ahead. That is not an argument to brush off. Crypto has been used by scammers, sanctions evaders, and criminal networks for the same reason it appeals to legitimate users, because it can move fast, cross borders, and bypass a lot of gatekeepers.
But this is where the policy fight gets real instead of ideological. Anti-money laundering rules can help law enforcement, but overbroad ones can also become surveillance by another name. If lawmakers answer every illicit-use concern by crushing privacy, self-custody, and neutral infrastructure, they will build a system that punishes ordinary users while the worst actors adapt anyway. That is not security. That is bureaucratic cosplay.
The other major objection is coming from the gambling industry, which is worried about how the bill could affect prediction markets. These are platforms where users speculate on future outcomes, and they sit in a messy regulatory gray zone between betting, derivatives, and event contracts.
Industry groups have asked the Senate to clarify that the bill would not expand the authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over sports betting through prediction market platforms. That issue matters because the CFTC is already locked in a dispute with operators like Kalshi and Polymarket. The agency says it has exclusive jurisdiction over those markets, but other parties are clearly not thrilled about where that could lead.
This is one of those Washington fights that sounds niche until you realize the line between financial products and gambling can have enormous consequences. If lawmakers blur that line too much, they can end up either overregulating useful markets or handing a giant loophole to products that look a lot like sports betting with a fresh coat of legal paint.
So yes, the CLARITY Act is about crypto. But it is also about something bigger, how much power regulators should have, where financial innovation ends, and where public policy concerns start demanding sharper guardrails.
That is why the bill is drawing pressure from several directions at once. Crypto advocates want certainty, anti-trafficking groups want stricter controls, gambling interests want jurisdiction limits, and lawmakers focused on ethics want more protections in the final text. Washington rarely agrees on anything this quickly, which is usually a sign that everyone expects a fight.
There is also a separate question hanging over the whole debate: if Congress gives the market a clearer rulebook, will institutions finally step in at scale?
Ric Edelman says yes. He argued that regulatory uncertainty remains one of the main reasons large pools of capital have not entered crypto. That makes sense. Big firms do not love building strategies in legal limbo, especially when the downside is regulatory whiplash and a nasty compliance bill.
Edelman pointed to firms including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, State Street, Invesco, and Fidelity as examples of major players expanding blockchain and tokenization efforts. Tokenization means turning an asset into a digital token on a blockchain so it can be tracked, traded, or settled more efficiently. In other words, it is one of the main ways traditional finance is testing blockchain without fully marrying the crypto casino.
The trend is real. It does not mean every pension fund is about to sprint into altcoins with laser eyes. But it does show that the old line, that institutional finance would ignore blockchain forever, has aged badly.
Edelman went even further, saying as many as 95% of institutions that currently lack crypto exposure could enter the market if the CLARITY Act becomes law. That is a bold prediction, and it should be treated as exactly that, an optimistic industry estimate, not a settled forecast. Big numbers make for great headlines, but they often turn into expensive footnotes when reality shows up.
He also pointed to Bitcoin ETF outflows and opposition from lawmakers such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as reasons investors remain cautious. That tracks. Even when new products make crypto more accessible, political risk and regulatory uncertainty still hang over the market like a storm cloud with a law degree.
The bigger point is more modest and more believable: clearer rules would probably help institutions decide where blockchain fits into their operations, whether that means custody, settlement, tokenization, or limited crypto exposure. That does not automatically mean they will buy everything with a ticker symbol and a community on X.
Most institutions want predictable compliance, not a religious awakening. They want clear jurisdiction, clearer custody rules, cleaner accounting treatment, and fewer chances to get kneecapped by a regulator after the fact. The CLARITY Act may not deliver all of that, but it is part of the push to replace guesswork with something closer to an actual framework.
Key questions and takeaways
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Why does the CLARITY Act matter?
It could finally give the U.S. a clearer rulebook for digital assets, including who regulates them and how companies handling them are supposed to comply. -
What is Cody Carbone arguing?
He says digital assets can lower costs by speeding up transactions, cutting payment fees, and making it easier to move money and assets. -
Why are anti-trafficking advocates worried?
AEHT says Section 604 could make it harder to track financial activity tied to crimes like human trafficking and wants stronger anti-money laundering protections. -
What is the prediction markets fight about?
Gambling groups want the Senate to make sure the bill does not expand the CFTC’s authority over platforms that could be treated like sports betting markets. -
Will clearer rules bring in more institutions?
Possibly, but not overnight. Edelman believes legal certainty could pull in more capital, yet institutions will still move cautiously if custody, accounting, and regulatory risks stay messy.
The CLARITY Act now sits at the center of a familiar crypto truth: the industry wants progress, but progress comes with tradeoffs. Better rules can support innovation, reduce uncertainty, and help serious firms build real products. They can also tighten compliance, sharpen surveillance concerns, and hand regulators more leverage than the industry would like.
That tension is the point. Crypto does not need blind worship, and it certainly does not need another round of empty moon-boy propaganda. It needs rules that are smart enough to protect consumers, target crime, and still leave room for open financial systems to compete with the old gatekeepers.
Further reading
A few useful background pieces on the market-structure fight and the broader crypto policy mess:
