Senators released new text for the Clarity Act, merging two versions and addressing for the first time what an ethics provision might look like. The bill isn't yet at the finish line though.

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Timeline

The narrative

We have a new draft of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which merges the drafts advanced by the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committees. It also adds an ethics provision that would bar senior government officials from sponsoring or issuing their own cryptocurrencies in response to President Donald Trump.

Why it matters

The window for passage is tightening, and while a new draft is progress, the fact that we're still waiting to see if there's bipartisan agreement on a key provision means the timeline is getting very tight indeed.

Breaking it down

Obviously the big question is will the Clarity Act pass? If you have a definitive answer to this question, let me know and also send me next week's lottery numbers, please and thank you.

While we have new text and it does have an ethics provision, the underlying dynamics of the debate don't seem to have changed very much. The key thing to note here is that while this is a crypto bill that will result in sweeping changes to how federal regulators and their jurisdictions are defined, the biggest outstanding issue doesn't really have a lot to do with that.

Democrats want a more binding ethics provision, one that will let them actually affect Trump and the $1.4 billion he made off crypto last year, while Trump and Republicans don't want that to happen.

The ethics provision that's currently in the bill — agreed to by the White House but not Senate Democrats — essentially gives Trump a year to divest or put his businesses into a blind trust, and directs the Department of Justice to enforce the provision. Democrats' objections include that they don't trust the Department of Justice to go after Trump while he's in office, and that the provision sunsets when the next president is inaugurated and bars future administrations from retroactively going after Trump. Trump could also continue benefiting from tokens with his name on them that already exist, and there's a name-image-likeness clause.

See ya’ll next week!