The odds keep sliding. In April, Wintermute's Hammond put the chance of the CLARITY Act passing this year at 30%, well under where traders had it at the time. By July the prediction market had drifted down to 31%. This week the number went lower. Two branches of the U.S. crypto rulebook stalled in the same stretch of days, and the CLARITY Act sits at the center of both.
The SEC scrapped its own crypto vote
On August 14 the SEC called off an open meeting where Chair Paul Atkins and commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda planned to vote on publishing Regulation Crypto as a proposed rule. The agency blamed an unforeseen scheduling issue and named no new date. Regulation Crypto is the SEC's attempt to build a framework without waiting for the CLARITY Act to pass.
The proposal is not small in ambition. It sketches a startup exemption of roughly $5 million over four years, a fundraising exemption of up to $75 million in any 12-month window, and a decentralization safe harbor that would let a token leave securities classification once its network matures. A yes vote would only have opened a 60 to 90 day comment period. Even that first step slipped.
September 15, and 60 votes to find
The CLARITY Act cleared the House with support from both parties. In the Senate it has sat. Majority Leader John Thune filed a cloture motion that ripens at 2:15 p.m. on September 15, and cloture is only the vote on whether to start debating the bill. It needs 60 senators to clear.
The holdups are familiar by now. Lawmakers are still arguing over ethics rules for officials who hold crypto, over protections for software developers, and over a banking worry that on-chain rewards programs could pull deposits out of ordinary accounts. None of those fights is close to settled.
Across town, the CFTC is not waiting
While Congress stalls, the other regulator moves. The CFTC will hold the first meeting of its Innovation Advisory Committee on August 20, a 35-seat panel that includes Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, and Solana Labs. The oddity: the agency is running on a single commissioner, Michael Selig, against a structure built for five.
Put the timeline in one place and the drift is hard to miss.
| When | Source | CLARITY 2026 passage odds |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | Wintermute's Hammond | About 30% |
| July 2026 | CLARITY prediction market | About 31% |
| August 2026 | Polymarket | About 21% |
Hammond's April read looked cautious when he made it. Four months later the SEC has postponed its comment period, the cloture clock has to survive September before anyone writes a final bill, and Polymarket sits near 21%. The churn has reached the product side too: Grayscale pulled three altcoin ETF filings days before new listing rules took hold. The next hard date sits on September 15, when the cloture clock finally runs out.
