CLARITY Act Odds Decline as SEC and CFTC Build Interim Fixes

Congress and the regulators are no longer moving on the same timeline. The CLARITY Act, the U.S. crypto market structure bill meant to settle long-running questions over digital asset issuance and trading, now looks less likely to pass in 2026. Galaxy Research’s latest read, the original report, points to fading legislative momentum and a shift toward faster agency action.

The banking sector’s resistance to sweeping market structure changes has already been visible in the Senate, where major crypto legislation faced a last-minute lobbying fight. That friction is now part of the broader backdrop for the CLARITY Act. As the calendar tightens, the practical question for exchanges, issuers, and compliance teams is not whether Congress will act, but which agency will fill the gap first.

Agency action is accelerating

The SEC and CFTC have responded to the uncertainty by pushing administrative measures: rulemaking, interpretive guidance, and regulatory exemptions. Galaxy says the goal is to clarify how digital assets should be issued, traded, and supervised while the legislative path remains blocked. A staff interpretation or an exemption can be more useful in the near term than a bill that may never get a floor vote.

That speed has real value. A token project waiting on registration guidance or a trading platform trying to understand which regulator has jurisdiction can make operational decisions off an agency action far sooner than off a stalled congressional process. For institutional buyers and token issuers, the difference between a statute and an agency exemption is not academic. A statute binds the agency and survives a leadership change. An exemption is only as durable as the current line of thinking at the commission.

The urgency is especially visible in tokenized real-world assets, where issuance and settlement structures are already scaling. Recent tokenization activity shows that market participants are not waiting for Washington to settle every definition before expanding products.

Temporary clarity has a hard ceiling

Galaxy’s caution is straightforward: administrative fixes lack legal durability. Rulemaking and guidance can be revised or reversed by a future administration, and they cannot replace a long-term framework established by Congress. That creates a different kind of uncertainty. Firms can build against an SEC staff position only to have a new chair unwind it after a political transition.

The result is a two-tier regulatory reality. Congress may still deliver a durable statute, but for now the industry is operating on guidance that is faster to arrive and easier to reverse. That is not a stable foundation for capital-intensive infrastructure decisions.

For legal and compliance leaders, the shift also changes the type of risk they have to manage. A legislative process carries one set of lobbying and timing risks. An administrative process carries another: the possibility that a guidance document disappears with a new administration, or that a court reads a rule more narrowly than staff intended. That distinction is now a planning cost, not a theoretical concern.

Meanwhile, builder activity continues to concentrate in a few dominant ecosystems regardless of the legal noise. Developer activity this week remains clustered among major Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, but the rules for the assets built on those chains still depend on whatever the agencies do next.