The Senate’s decision not to advance the CLARITY Act this week leaves digital asset markets in a familiar limbo. But the case for the bill has a surprisingly tangible anchor: the parts of FTX that survived its collapse. When the exchange imploded in 2022, the entities that had complied with U.S. legal and regulatory requirements—such as its CFTC-regulated derivatives platform—were able to be separated, preserved, and eventually sold, returning value to creditors. That outcome is now being wielded as a live experiment proving why precisely the kind of framework the CLARITY Act would provide is needed.
In an op-ed published Friday, Randi Abernethy of the exchange group Bullish argued that the bill’s failure to pass the Senate represents a missed opportunity to extend the same legal protections that allowed parts of FTX to survive to the entire digital asset market. The original report points to the irony that mainstream finance is converging with digital assets, yet the law meant to govern that convergence remains stalled.
The CLARITY Act is designed to delineate how digital assets are classified under securities and commodities laws, a gap that has left exchanges and issuers navigating enforcement actions rather than clear rules. While the bill has broad industry support, it has faced resistance from banking interests wary of a more direct regulatory path for non-bank digital asset platforms. As previously reported, banks were lobbying aggressively to kill a major crypto bill just days before the Senate was set to vote, demanding changes to a compromise they had earlier agreed to. That pushback mirrors the political headwinds that ultimately stalled this week’s effort.
For traders and institutions, the consequences of inaction are not abstract. The current regulatory landscape forces platforms to make go/no-go decisions based on interpretive letters and enforcement precedents, not statutes. FTX’s non-U.S. operations, which operated outside that legal perimeter, became the epicenter of fraud, while the regulated U.S. entity remained solvent. That split is exactly what the CLARITY Act aims to eliminate—by bringing the entire market under a coherent legal umbrella, it would reduce the ability of bad actors to exploit offshore regulatory voids.
Bullish and the Institutional Push for Clarity
Bullish itself is no bystander. The exchange group has been building an institutional-grade infrastructure, including a recent $4.2 billion acquisition of Equiniti, a move that underscores the scale at which traditional and digital finance are already merging. For such mergers to work without legal chaos, a clear federal framework is essential. Without it, every integration carries additional regulatory risk, slowing the convergence that Abernethy describes. The CLARITY Act is not just a consumer-protection measure; it’s a market-structure bill that would define the playing field for the next wave of tokenized assets.
What Remains Uncertain
Despite the compelling FTX narrative, the bill’s path forward is murky. The banking lobby’s concerns center on how such a law might enable non-bank entities to offer services traditionally reserved for banks, raising systemic risk questions that are unlikely to be resolved quickly. Moreover, the broader political calendar leaves a shrinking window for major crypto legislation. The bill may need to be reintroduced, and its provisions could be altered or watered down to gain traction.
For now, the industry is left pointing to the FTX case study every time a lawmaker questions the need for new rules. The survival of FTX’s U.S. arm is not just a talking point—it’s evidence that clear jurisdictional lines protect customers and markets. The Senate’s failure to act means that protection remains piecemeal, leaving the bulk of crypto activity governed by enforcement rather than legislative intent.
