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Politics & conflicts

What regulatory clarity can and cannot fix

Oh, look at all the accounts with some crypto coin in their name begging Washington to pass the CLARITY Act as if Congress is about to descend from the heavens and fix crypto and give a bullrun for fun.

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Oh, look at all the accounts with some crypto coin in their name begging Washington to pass the CLARITY Act as if Congress is about to descend from the heavens and fix crypto and give a bullrun for fun.

What the CLARITY Act would actually do is far less romantic.

It would draw clearer jurisdictional lines between the SEC and CFTC, establish classifications for digital assets, create registration and disclosure frameworks, give certain crypto projects a clearer route to raising capital, and provide the industry with something it has wanted for years: legal certainty.

But regulatory clarity does not magically turn this industry into a healthy market.

What it can do, however, is give the entire sector (only in the US) considerably more legitimacy, institutional access and legal certainty.

And that is where the gigantic conflict of interest sitting in the White House becomes impossible to ignore.

Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from crypto ventures in 2025. He and his family have direct economic exposure to an industry whose regulatory position his own administration and Congress are now reshaping.

Earlier versions of the CLARITY Act were criticised specifically because their ethics provisions would have done little to prevent him from continuing to profit from those ventures.

The conflict became so blatant that lawmakers have now had to rewrite the legislation again, adding stricter ethics language specifically aimed at public officials profiting from crypto.

So watching Crypto Twitter reduce this entire debate to “PASS CLARITY” is embarrassing.

You can support sensible market structure legislation. I do. Crypto desperately needs coherent rules.

But regulatory clarity written while the sitting president is simultaneously making enormous amounts of money from the industry being regulated deserves a hell of a lot more scrutiny than a hashtag and another fucking coin logo in your username.

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