Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor says the Senate's 49-50 vote blocking the Clarity Act helps the crypto industry, because regulators can write rules without new legislation.
Key Points:
- Saylor argues that a law can make restrictions permanent as easily as it protects rights.
- The Clarity Act fell 11 votes short of the 60 needed to advance in the Senate.
- He wants the industry to reach 50 million U.S. users before pressing Congress again.
Saylor Backs Regulators Over Congress
Saylor made his case on X on Saturday, days after the bill collapsed. He argued that a statute can lock in restrictions as easily as it protects rights, so the industry should study what it would be making permanent. Certainty, in his telling, is not worth accepting new limits.
Senators rejected the procedural motion on H.R. 3633 on Sep. 15, leaving it 11 votes short of the 60 needed to open debate. Every Democrat present voted no, joined by four Republicans, though Sen. Thom Tillis moved to reconsider and kept the bill on the Senate calendar.
Opposition hardened around ethics rules covering federal officials' crypto holdings, and around bank objections to rewards paid on stablecoins. In an essay Strategy published Sep. 19, Saylor objected to limits on payments that platforms make to customers for simply holding payment stablecoins. He also faulted a proposed sandbox that would have capped participating firms at 25 employees and each agency at 20 project approvals a year.
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SEC And CFTC Rules Advance
The bill would have divided oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and both agencies are pressing ahead anyway.
Two days after the vote, the SEC granted conditional relief letting approved venues trade certain tokenized stocks onchain, and the CFTC sent its own market rules to the White House for review.
"We should use the next two years to put better financial products into people's hands," Saylor wrote, pointing to an administration willing to modernize financial markets. He set a target of 50 million U.S. users for such products, arguing that a large customer base would raise the political cost of reversing course. Paul Atkins, who chairs the SEC, has said the agency will act within its statutory authority with or without a law.
Saylor's Recent Bitcoin Remarks
It was not his first comment on the vote.
A day after the bill stalled, Saylor predicted that the SEC, CFTC and Treasury would advance rules under existing law, and that banks would widen custody of Bitcoin (BTC) and lending against it. Strategy noted on the day of the vote that the CFTC has long treated Bitcoin as a commodity and that regulators had already cleared spot Bitcoin products. His company began buying Bitcoin in 2020 and has built its balance sheet around the asset since.
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