Fresh on the heels of achieving a historic stablecoin law, the cryptocurrency industry has signaled it’s willing to sink money — and political pressure — into securing comprehensive legislation.
“I’ll tell you very clearly that CLARITY is the top priority for the industry. This is where the rubber is meeting the road,” a source familiar with the thinking of the industry’s political operation told NOTUS.
There’s a self-imposed Sept. 30 deadline for Congress to send a sweeping bill regulating crypto to President Donald Trump’s desk. The House passed the CLARITY Act, short for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would establish a regulatory framework for digital assets such as crypto, last week. The Senate Banking Committee released a discussion draft Tuesday that Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis said builds on the House’s bill, meaning the House will likely have to vote again on the Senate version before it hits the president’s desk.
But the ups and downs of the House’s self-proclaimed “Crypto Week” showed that passing this kind of legislation isn’t necessarily straightforward. There are plenty of divisions within both the Republican and Democratic parties that the industry is keeping a close eye on.
“Now we have some real policy votes, and that’s going to provide clear guidance on where people stand,” the source said. When NOTUS asked if that also meant clear guidance on the industry’s political spending in 2026, they said, “There’s no question about it.”
Last Tuesday, the primary pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake gave Politico an early peek at its sizable war chest as the 2026 election starts to heat up — a clear message to potential roadblocks.
Fairshake and its affiliated super PACs, Defend American Jobs and Protect Progress, have more than $140 million in cash on hand, a spokesperson confirmed to NOTUS. The official filing is not due to hit the Federal Election Commission website until next Thursday.
That exceeds even the more than $130 million that the three super PACs collectively spent during the 2024 election, an already eye-popping amount.
One of Fairshake’s top targets last cycle, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a three-term senator and crypto critic, lost his seat to now-Sen. Bernie Moreno. The race was considered a toss-up, and the more than $40.1 million that Defend American Jobs spent on media production and placement supporting Moreno was seen as a factor that helped tip the scales.
The Fairshake spokesperson pointed NOTUS to a statement by the Cedar Innovation Foundation, an affiliated nonprofit, that described CLARITY as “the most important vote members will take this Congress.”
Cedar also said it “will invest our resources to educate members on its benefits and advocate for its passage.”
Robin Cook, legislative counsel at Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange and a prominent industry voice in Washington, told NOTUS that the CLARITY bill provides consumers protection, industry clear rules of the road and the government the ability to shape and lead on digital assets.
“The technology can’t be uninvented. And if people aren’t building in the United States and doing it under U.S. rules, they’ll be building it somewhere else, under someone else’s rules, and that’s a missed opportunity,” Cook said.
Still, opponents of recent crypto legislation aren’t taking kindly to the notion of industry pressure.
“The crypto industry thinks that they can buy the federal government. The amount of money that they threw around on the 2024 election was staggering, and they’re threatening to do it again,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading Democratic opponents of the GENIUS Act in the Senate, told NOTUS on Thursday.
In conversations with NOTUS, multiple Democratic lawmakers who have recently opposed recent crypto-related legislation lamented the current regulatory environment that allows industries to tout large amounts of money to influence their regulators.
“I think it fundamentally goes back to the fact that we’ve abandoned any control of our election spending,” Sen. Jack Reed, who voted against the GENIUS Act in the Senate and is running for reelection next year, told NOTUS. “Citizens United really opened the door for big money in elections, and they take advantage of it.”
“Ultimately, I hope everyone does what they think is the right thing to do and try to communicate it with their people,” Reed said.
Others in the party warned the industry against labeling any single lawmaker as being widely against crypto.
“It’s false to suggest that because somebody doesn’t support a bill, doesn’t support an industry, a concept or a tool,” Democratic Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove told NOTUS last week minutes before voting for the GENIUS Act and against the CLARITY Act.
“I think it’s also a bullying tactic to say ‘If you don’t vote for something I like, I’m going to go after you.’ Many of us are looking at the fulsomeness of the legislation and see great, grave holes in a hastily designed bill that was designed to appease one person,” Kamlager-Dove said, criticizing Trump’s previous August deadline to Republicans to deliver crypto legislation.
Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance called on the industry to increase its political support for politicians who are friendly to crypto interests at a Bitcoin conference. Hours after the House passed the GENIUS Act last Thursday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said that the current momentum behind crypto was only possible thanks to Trump’s support, going as far as characterizing Biden-era digital assets regulation as an “anti-crypto crusade.”
The Biden-era Securities and Exchange Commission filed lawsuits against several crypto exchanges, including Coinbase, Ripple and Binance, accusing them of acting as an unregistered securities broker. The industry accused the federal government of “regulating by enforcement” and pushed for clear rules of the road.
CLARITY seeks to establish a regulatory framework for the industry, including classifying which digital assets count as securities versus commodities. The Senate Banking Committee discussion draft would also insert the word “innovation” into the SEC’s mission statement, meaning the agency would have to take that into consideration during the rulemaking process alongside its current mandate to consider the “promotion of efficiency, competition, and capital formation.”
Trump’s pushing of crypto and some Democratic brokers trying to dispel the notion that their party is hostile to crypto are making industry regulation more likely to sail through Congress than any time before.
“Crypto is here to stay, stablecoin is here to stay. So the question is, are we going to regulate it or are we going to let the status quo remain dangerously unregulated?” Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democratic sponsor of the CLARITY Act, told NOTUS last week.
“If we fail to do it now, this is never going to be done,” Torres added. “In politics, you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”