Latest news with #CLARITYAct
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Bitcoin Will Rally as U.S. Growth Improves, Crypto Bills Progress: Coinbase Research
A more upbeat macroeconomic backdrop, growing corporate appetite for digital assets, and increased regulatory clarity will fuel a constructive outlook for crypto markets in the second half of 2025, according to a report by Coinbase Research. After a bumpy first quarter marked by a brief contraction in U.S. GDP and trade disruptions, data now point to stronger growth. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tracker has jumped to 3.8% QoQ as of early June, a sharp upgrade from earlier in the year. This shift, alongside expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts and a less aggressive trade policy, has eased recession fears and strengthened investor sentiment. Declining dollar dominance and inflation protection use-cases may also boost bitcoin's BTC appeal, even if long-dated U.S. Treasury yields remain elevated, the report said. Altcoins may lag unless they benefit from specific catalysts, such as ETF approvals or protocol developments. Meanwhile, public companies are increasingly adding crypto to their balance sheets, aided by a 2024 rule change allowing "mark-to-market" accounting for digital assets. While this trend is expanding demand, it's also introducing new systemic risks. Firms that fund crypto buys with convertible debt may be forced to sell if refinancing options dry up or prices fall sharply. Regulatory developments are also expected to reshape the market, the report said. The Senate recently passed the GENIUS Act, a bipartisan stablecoin bill now heading to the House. A broader market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, aims to define the roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in overseeing digital assets. If passed, it could clarify rules for both issuers and investors. Separately, the SEC is considering more than 80 crypto ETF applications, including multi-asset funds and proposals involving staking and altcoins. Some rulings could be made as early as July, and the rest are likely to be finalized by October. Overall, bitcoin appears poised to benefit from both macro and structural tailwinds in the second half of the year, while the outlook for altcoins will depend on navigating a more complex and still-evolving regulatory and liquidity environment, according to the report. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Digital Assets Are One Step Closer to Regulatory Clarity
The United States is on the brink of a new technological frontier – one powered by blockchain and digital assets. These assets are not just the next phase of the internet, but lay the foundation for a more secure, decentralized, and inclusive financial future. From reimagining global payments to protecting data privacy, the potential of blockchain-based systems is endless. Despite the promise of this technology, the United States remains without a clear, comprehensive federal regulatory framework for digital assets. This absence has created uncertainty for innovators, consumers and investors alike. Entrepreneurs operating in the digital asset operating in the digital asset space face ambiguous rules and unclear jurisdictional boundaries between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Investors lack the transparency and protection they deserve. Under the Biden Administration, the SEC chose to regulate through enforcement, rather than through clear guidance or collaboration. The agency's approach has led to lawsuits, confusion, and the offshoring of promising American companies seeking regulatory certainty abroad. For years, Congress has worked under both Republican and Democratic leadership to close this gap and create a tailored, modern regulatory framework. That work reached a milestone in May 2024 when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century (FIT21) Act with bipartisan support as 71 Democrats voted in favor of the bill. FIT21 laid the groundwork for how digital assets should be treated under U.S. law, clarified the roles of the CFTC and SEC, and provided pathways for registration, disclosure, and compliance. This Congress, we are building on that momentum and continue to push for smart, tailored policy that fosters innovation while protecting consumers. In April, the House Financial Services Committee passed the bipartisan STABLE Act, which would establish a clear and comprehensive set of rules for the issuance and regulation of payment stablecoins that have the potential to modernize the way we transact by making payments faster, cheaper, and more inclusive. Yesterday, we took another major step forward. The Financial Services Committee and the House Agriculture Committee passed the CLARITY Act, a landmark bipartisan bill that was carefully crafted between our committees. The CLARITY Act establishes a functional framework for the classification of digital assets, provides builders and firms with clear regulatory obligations, and ensures robust consumer protections against fraud and bad actors. The STABLE and CLARITY Acts form the most comprehensive digital asset regulatory framework Congress has ever advanced. Collectively, these bills will ensure that the United States sets the global standard for the future of digital assets. We are committed to working with our colleagues in both chambers to enact comprehensive digital asset legislation into law. The rest of the world is not waiting to lead in blockchain innovation. If we fail to act, we risk ceding leadership in one of the most transformative technologies in modern history. Congress has the opportunity and responsibility to establish a regulatory framework that unlocks the next era of American innovation. It is time for the United States to lead in the new digital frontier.
CNBC
4 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
House committees advance crypto market structure regulation to floor vote: CNBC Crypto World
On today's episode of CNBC Crypto World, major cryptocurrencies climb after it was revealed that consumer prices rose less than expected in May as President Trump's tariffs had yet to show significant impact on inflation. Plus, two House committees advanced the CLARITY Act crypto market structure bill, which now moves to the House floor. And, Stellar CEO Denelle Dixon discusses a new partnership between the Stellar blockchain and PayPal.
The Hill
5 days ago
- Business
- The Hill
Two House panels advance crypto market structure bill
A pair of House panels voted Tuesday to advance legislation laying out oversight of the crypto market. The House Financial Services Committee and House Agriculture Committee held separate markups on the CLARITY Act, with both ultimately voting to report the bill out of committee. The scenes in the two committees, however, were vastly different. The House Agriculture Committee voted 47-6 to advance the legislation after a relatively brief two-and-a-half-hour discussion. The House Financial Services Committee, by contrast, spent nearly twelve hours working through dozens of amendments before reaching a final vote shortly before midnight. The panel was also more split on the bill, with a 32-19 vote to advance the legislation. 'Congress has a historic opportunity to provide the clear regulatory framework needed to unlock this innovation,' House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) said in a statement. 'I am proud that the Financial Services Committee, along with the House Agriculture Committee, took this vital step in advancing the bipartisan CLARITY Act through our Committees,' he continued. 'I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their support as this bill is one step closer to becoming law.' The CLARITY Act splits regulation of the digital assets market between two regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The bill has to be approved by both panels since the House Financial Services Committee oversees the SEC, while the House Agriculture Committee has jurisdiction over the CFTC. The legislation has faced pushback from House Democrats, particularly as President Trump and his family have increasingly expanded their involvement in the crypto space, from meme coins to stablecoins. 'Republicans are jamming through the 'CALAMITY Act,' which not only legitimizes Trump's corruption, but also creates enormous loopholes that expose investors to fraud and weakens our national security,' Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, said Tuesday. Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, offered a more conciliatory tone while still voicing some concerns about the bill. 'The CLARITY Act is not a perfect bill, but it's an important step forward,' Craig said Tuesday, later adding, 'I still believe while many of us are going to vote here today to advance this legislation that there is still some work to do before it gets to the House floor.' The votes to advance the market structure legislation in the House comes as the Senate prepares to hold another key procedural vote on stablecoin legislation Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) moved to end debate Monday on an updated version of the GENIUS Act, which seeks to create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, teeing up the final few votes on the legislation in the upper chamber.
Coin Geek
5 days ago
- Business
- Coin Geek
US advances crypto market structure bill, tees up STABLE
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... United States digital asset market structure legislation got a boost from two House committees, while the Senate is set to do likewise with its stablecoin legislation this week. Tuesday saw two House of Representatives committees—Agriculture and Financial Services—hold dueling markup hearings on the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which aims to divvy federal responsibility for overseeing digital assets. CLARITY assigns most of this responsibility to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), with a minor role for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the (now exceedingly unlikely) case that certain tokens are deemed to be securities as defined by the Howey test. The Ag committee—to which the CFTC reports—went first, approving CLARITY by a 47-6 vote after minimal debate, or at least, without major fireworks. It was a different story at the Financial Services committee—which oversees the SEC—which took until early Wednesday to finish debating (and rejecting) an endless series of amendments before voting 32-19 to favorably report their version of CLARITY to the rest of the House. The two marked-up versions must now be consolidated into a single bill before heading to the House floor for a vote. Assuming the votes are there, this will mark the second time the House will have passed market structure legislation, following last year's passage of FIT 21 (which came too late to be taken up by the Senate ahead of last year's elections). While much of the Financial Services Committee conversation focused on President Donald Trump's sprawling crypto ventures, one of the buzziest elements came before the hearing when CLARITY was revised to exclude any 'non-controlling blockchain developer or provider of a blockchain service' from having to conform to money transmitting rules and regulations. The language previously existed in a standalone bill called the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act that has kicked around Congress for years without becoming law. Including it in CLARITY was a bone tossed to decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and developers who have long argued that, since they don't technically custody assets flowing through their creations, they shouldn't be held to the same responsibilities as platforms that do control customer assets. Federal court rulings have supported this DeFi-friendly view, but there will be no need for judges to intercede on developers' behalf if this protection is codified into law. There will almost certainly also be an explosion in the use of crypto 'mixing services' like Tornado Cash by hackers and other bad actors looking to launder and obfuscate the digital trail of their ill-gotten gains. Once this language was included in the revised CLARITY, a number of crypto lobbying groups issued a joint statement hailing its inclusion as 'a meaningful step towards protecting developers of non-custodial, peer-to-peer technologies while maintaining strong oversight of custodial financial institutions.' What did the president sell and when did he sell it? As far as the committee's Democrat members were concerned, last week's dueling CLARITY hearings didn't feature enough discussion of the view that Trump is influencing the loosening of crypto's regulatory guardrails to line his own pocket. As such, the Dems held a 'minority day' hearing on June 6 that aimed to shine the spotlight on Trump's apparent crypto self-interest. Ranking member Maxine Waters (D-CA) opened the proceedings by claiming that 'the unfortunate reality is that Republicans on this Committee refuse to openly admit that Donald Trump is abusing his position as President to enrich himself off crypto.' This subject was raised again and again on Tuesday but continued to fall on deaf GOP ears. To illustrate how the two sides were talking past each other, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) at one point expressed incredulity that CLARITY would restrict nearly every public official except the president and vice-president from using non-public information on digital assets for personal profit or sharing said info with others. In response, chairman French Hill (R-AR) replied that 'when people say 'I want this conflict removed' and they name a subject, that subject is addressed in this bill.' Except, as Himes just pointed out, it's very much not addressed. Regardless, Hill claimed that CLARITY 'captures everyone participating in it … everyone regardless of their last name is subject to the same oversight and enforcement under the requirements of this bill before us.' Back to the top ↑ Senate stablecoin hardball Over in the Senate, market structure legislation is still in the embryonic stage but the same can't be said for the GENIUS stablecoin bill. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) invoked cloture on GENIUS for the second time, filing a new 120-page substitute version of the bill that will set up a cloture vote on Wednesday, followed by further debate this week and a floor vote possibly as early as Monday (16). Thune evidently became concerned that the growing number of amendments—122 as of June 9, up from 71 last week—presented an unwanted obstacle to getting a 'clean' version of GENIUS to the Senate floor for a vote. While some Senators continue to submit proposed tweaks, Thune filed an 'amendment tree' that requires new amendments to win unanimous approval, effectively consigning these last-minute entrants to the dustbin. Thune's latest version of the bill was officially submitted by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and incorporates a handful of minor changes intended to help sway reluctant senators (mostly Democrats) to a 'yes' vote. But it doesn't include the most contentious amendments like the unrelated credit card swipe fee language being pushed by Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) that many senators viewed as a dealbreaker. There's also none of the Democrat-filed amendments intended to clip the president's crypto-profiteering ways. The House Financial Services Committee approved their own stablecoin legislation (STABLE) on April 2 in a 10-hour markup session that rivaled Tuesday's marathon. Once both chambers have approved their respective bills, they need to agree on a harmonized bill they can send to Trump's desk for signing into law. Back to the top ↑ SEC hints at DeFi 'exemption'; Quintenz eager to join CFTC 'clusterf*ck' DeFi scored another win on Monday during the SEC's latest 'crypto roundtable,' this one titled DeFi and the American Spirit. The opening remarks by newly confirmed SEC Chair Paul Atkins included his direction to SEC staff to 'consider a conditional exemptive relief framework or 'innovation exemption' that would expeditiously allow registrants and non-registrants to bring on-chain products and services to market.' Some DeFi boosters have erroneously reinterpreted Atkins' comments to claim that DeFi had been exempted from any SEC oversight whatsoever. Atkins didn't go that far, but did suggest that the U.S. shouldn't allow 'century-old regulatory frameworks to stifle innovation with technologies that could upend and most importantly improve and advance our current, traditional intermediated model.' The day after the SEC's table talk, President Trump's nominee to head up the CFTC was being grilled on Capitol Hill. Brian Quintenz is a former CFTC commissioner who currently serves as head of policy at crypto-focused venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Quintenz also served as a director for Kalshi, the prediction market that waged a long-running legal battle with the agency Quintenz now hopes to lead. These industry ties led some members of the Senate Agriculture Committee to question whether Quintenz might be conflicted while overseeing companies with which he had such deep ties. There's also the minor matter that Kalshi's list of 'strategic advisors' includes Donald Trump Jr., presenting yet more potential conflict. Quintenz's prepared remarks held up his work history as a major selling point, although he lost points by citing his earlier history as a young legislative 'aid' in the House for over six years. (All that time and he never learned to spell 'aide'?) Grammatic quibbles aside, Quintenz espoused his view that blockchain was 'a horizontal technology that has the potential to touch every aspect of society,' not just financial services. However, Quintenz claimed that this will only happen if digital asset operators 'have clear rules of the road to build without fear of regulation by enforcement.' Quintenz urged Congress to hurry up and pass market structure legislation already, stressing the need for 'token classification clarity and clear jurisdiction for trading market oversight.' Quintenz claimed that 'blockchain and crypto tokens are here to stay,' so it was time to either legislate/regulate or get off the pot. Quintenz argued that the CFTC will require 'new resources' to handle its new crypto responsibilities, a stance with which most of the senators appeared to concur. Asked about his work with Kalshi and the possibility of CFTC-approved prediction markets horning in on gambling operators' turf, Quintenz deflected, saying those types of conflicts were best left to Congress to muddle through. Earlier this year, the CFTC was scheduled to hold a prediction markets roundtable that many high-profile gaming operators were expected to attend. But the event was canceled without explanation, save vague promises of reshaping the roundtable into 'more of a forum or hearing.' Quintenz said he'd reschedule the meeting once he was confirmed. Quintenz was also questioned about the unprecedented number of CFTC commissioners who have announced their exits in recent weeks. Of the five commissioner seats, only two are currently occupied, and one of those (Caroline Pham) is only sticking around until Quintenz is confirmed, while the other (Kristin Johnson) is planning to leave at some unspecified date this year. Pressed as to whether he'd urge President Trump to maintain tradition by appointing bipartisan replacements for the four outgoing commissioners, Quintenz dodged, saying he wasn't about to 'tell the president what to do.' Quintenz's eventual confirmation by the GOP-controlled Senate doesn't appear to be in any serious jeopardy. But with Congress poised to hand the bulk of crypto oversight to the commissioner-bereft CFTC, one former Wall Street regulator told Politico that Quintenz was 'walking into a clusterf*ck.' Back to the top ↑ Wallet war truce, Trump mining treasury Meanwhile, last week's highly public slapfight over who had the right to issue a Trump-branded digital wallet appears to have resolved itself. GetTrumpMemes, the company behind the $TRUMP memecoin, made waves last week with claims to have partnered with non-fungible token (NFT) platform Magic Eden on the launch of 'The Official $TRUMP Wallet by President Trump.' But Trump's sons Don Jr., Eric, and Barron all pushed back hard on these claims, disavowing any family role and revealing that the Trump-controlled DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLF) had its own official Trump wallet in the works. Bloomberg subsequently reported that WLF sent cease-and-desist letters to the unauthorized wallet launchers, and the GetTrumpMemes' site went offline shortly thereafter. The @TrumpWalletApp X account, which had been suspended last week, is currently back online but its posts are limited to approved followers. On June 6, Eric Trump tweeted that the parties behind $TRUMP had 'aligned' with WLF and the $TRUMP wallet 'isn't moving forward.' The official WLF X account added that '[t]he Trump meme and WLFI may be different lanes, but they share the same highway.' Eric also revealed that WLF 'plans to acquire a substantial position in $TRUMP for their Long-Term Treasury.' The $TRUMP token, which had fallen to $9.56 in the wake of the highly public dustup, rallied slightly following Eric's buying announcement and currently sits around $10.80. There doesn't appear to be any hard feelings on the president's part, as on June 5, he reposted a $TRUMP-promoting Newsmax article to his Truth Social account that claimed the token was a 'tracker' of the president's success. However, since the May 20 article notes the price of the token was 'over $13,' the president's 'success' is trending in the opposite direction. That downward trend could accelerate next month, as 50.5 million additional $TRUMP tokens are scheduled to be unlocked on July 18. That represents 25% of the current circulating supply. A similarly large unlock will occur on January 18, 2026. Additional smaller unlocks (about 1% of the circulating supply every three days) are occurring daily, and this pace will increase to just under 1% of the circulating supply every two days by next January. Meanwhile, the Trump-linked block reward mining outfit American Bitcoin Corp (ABTC) has amassed a BTC 'treasury' of 215 tokens worth around $23 million as of May 31. In a filing with the SEC, ABTC says its BTC holdings will be 'long-term in nature,' and the company 'expects to continue accumulating' tokens into the future. There's no specific target for how much BTC might be enough for ABTC, nor whether the company might raise additional capital to buy more. ABTC states emphatically that building up this treasury 'is not a side effect of ABTC's business. It is the business. ABTC's Layer 2 strategy is designed to transform its Bitcoin production into long-term Bitcoin ownership.' ABTC was launched on April 1 as a majority-owned subsidiary of mining outfit Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT), with the Trump family holding 20% of ABTC. Hut 8 provided 'substantially all' of ABTC's mining rigs (~61,000 rigs), with the Trump contribution limited to new chief strategy officer Eric Trump's 'commercial acumen, capital markets expertise,' and other intangible qualities. Back to the top ↑ Watch: Breaking down solutions to blockchain regulation hurdles title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">
