共和党参议员公布 Clarity Act 最终妥协草案并承诺本周启动程序性投票，特朗普公开背书，加密业与银行业游说战进入关键窗口

Donald Trump welcomed crypto executives to the White House last month with a roll call of flattery: Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong was “one of the greats,” the president said, and Gemini Space Station co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were “tremendous investors, brilliant people.”

It was clear that crypto’s top executives had the world’s most powerful ally in their corner. But Trump wasn’t there just to sing their praises. He was urging Congress to support a landmark bill, the Clarity Act, that could supercharge the virtual-asset industry and further integrate it into the financial mainstream.

“We need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act, a fair version of the Clarity Act,” Trump told the gathering.

Notably absent from the White House event were the nation’s banking behemoths and community lenders, who have argued that the bill would let crypto firms continue making interest-like payments on customers’ holdings of stablecoins, a type of virtual token tied to a fiat currency. That’s a prospect that, according to the banking industry, could mean chunks of its deposits get siphoned away.

Senators have promised to kick off procedural votes later this week. Ahead of that, Republican senators released a final draft of the bill, with changes addressing some of its most contentious points.

The new version would give the Treasury Secretary power to intervene if deposit flight became “detrimental” to community banks. It also added new ethics guard rails for the president and other elected officials holding cryptocurrencies, which had been a sticking point for Democrats. The new ethics rules would force the president to divest from virtual assets or place significant holdings in a blind trust, or else face financial penalties. It also empowered state attorneys general to play a role in enforcing the ethics rules.

It’s still far from certain the bill will pass and hand the digital-asset industry its coveted victory. Banking trade groups, which have been caught flat-footed on crypto policy again and again over the past year, earlier managed to help stall a vote that had been threatened before Congress’s August recess.

That success was partly thanks to community bankers, who worked longstanding relationships with their state delegations in the weeks leading up to Washington’s summer exodus, according to people familiar with the matter.

“We can be the crypto capital of the world and the banking capital of the world, but to get there we need sensible guardrails in place for digital assets,” the American Bankers Association said in an emailed statement. “We should be able to embrace innovation without undermining the economy, consumer protection and a banking system that remains the envy of the world.”

Many in the banking industry say they would support the legislation with a few key tweaks, including explicit rules prohibiting stablecoin interest and rewards. But even if they succeed in holding back the Clarity Act, changes are coming. The leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, both avowed crypto believers, have pledged to move forward with rulemaking if legislation isn’t forthcoming.

“President Trump promised to deliver a cryptoasset market structure, and we will help him deliver if Congress will not,” Michael Selig, chairman and the only sitting commissioner of the normally five-person CFTC, said at an August event. Selig’s agency stands to be the primary regulator of the industry if Clarity becomes law.

The bill faces a narrowing window to advance if the standoff comes to a head when the Senate reconvenes this week. One of the biggest remaining hurdles is likely to be getting Trump to agree to ethics language that Senate Democrats have requested be included in the bill that could force his divestiture from the industry that brought him more than $1 billion in personal wealth last year alone. One version of an ethics agreement could also give state attorneys general the power to prosecute violations if the Justice Department fails to do so.

Republican senators, including Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis, have said that, should the bill fail, they would lay the blame squarely on Democrats’ intransigence and desire to kill crypto. If that happens, Democrats may find themselves in a difficult position as the digital-asset industry prepares to unleash its political war chest ahead of the midterm elections in November.

Genius Act

The crypto industry, having marshaled hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and marketing efforts since 2024, has managed to steamroll the much older, more entrenched banking industry in Washington, notching a series of legislative successes: the Genius Act to regulate stablecoins, bank charters granted to a raft of crypto firms, and government agencies rolling out beneficial policies and waivers.

Crypto’s tactics in advancing Clarity have profoundly rattled traditional finance firms, which had grown accustomed to commanding sway in the halls of Congress. It’s a new and sobering position to be in, according to lobbyists, executives and other people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly and about non-public discussions.

And Armstrong holds another bit of leverage: The industry’s massive super PAC, Fairshake, has demonstrated its willingness to spend heavily against perceived political enemies, a fact not lost on legislators facing reelection in the midterms or with an eye on the 2028 race. Coinbase is one of the political spending group’s biggest financial backers.

While both contingents are well-resourced, crypto proved willing to spend against specific candidates. Fairshake helped bury Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s reelection bid in 2024 over his anti-crypto stance.

“They’ve been a little bit more surgical in the application of their money than the banks have been,” said Christopher Giancarlo, former chairman of the CFTC. “The crypto industry organized itself pretty quickly,” he said. “They scared a lot of people.”

An advocacy group Coinbase created, Stand With Crypto, shows lawmakers they’re on notice by assigning letter grades to candidates as a gauge of their friendliness to digital assets. Among the Democrats, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren gets an F, while New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand gets top marks. The strategy, recycled from the National Rifle Association, is applying a more public kind of pressure than the more staid banking industry is used to exerting.

The Blockchain Association started a letter-writing campaign fueled by AI-generated letters, flooding congressional staffers on both sides of the issue with thousands of messages. The measure was not appreciated on Capitol Hill, where it could render staffers’ inboxes virtually unusable, two people familiar with the matter said.

“There are places where banks are going to be out-competed,” said Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. “When you look at the relative size of the industries, that seems crazy. But then you look at political spending.”

Armstrong played up that new competitive tension in a recent taunt to JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon. The Coinbase executive posteda fake ad riffing on the hit television series Heated Rivalry, in which two hockey players on opposing teams carry on a clandestine, scorching romance. Armstrong’s parody replaced the athletes with images of himself squaring off against Dimon on an ice-hockey rink.

The real-life drama for banks, though, has been Trump’s volatile second term. For the first time, an occupant of the White House was railing against “de-banking” practices, claiming his companies had been unfairly cut off by major lenders. He targeted credit-card swipe fees and interest rates, which sent the industry scrambling. At the same time, he reported at least $1.4 billion in personal crypto earnings while in office. The Genius Act sailed through Congress with the White House’s support, and Trump signed it into law. And earlier this year, the president warned lenders against undermining his digital-asset agenda.

“Donald Trump was anti-crypto in his first term,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Now he’s realized that today crypto is his biggest source of wealth generation. The main way the banks got outplayed is Trump realized he could get rich off crypto.”

A spokesperson for White House said in an emailed statement that the president “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” adding that “the Trump Administration has already agreed to the most comprehensive and wide-ranging ethics provision in history and continues to work with Congress on the CLARITY Act.”

The White House convened several meetings with envoys sent by banks and the crypto industry to discuss stablecoin yields, a major sticking point in negotiations. Patrick Witt, Trump’s senior crypto adviser, invited trade groups and their individual members from both sides, according to screenshots of messages he later posted on social media. While crypto companies sent people authorized to make decisions, bank envoys consisted of trade group functionaries without decision-making power, according to people familiar with the matter.

As crypto executives pushed to hash out deals on the spot, the banking industry trade representatives demurred and said they’d need time to confer with their members before conceding any points, the people said. That rankled some lawmakers and White House officials eager to reach a deal, they said.

Banks’ pushback has focused mainly on trying to highlight their industry’s importance for the American economy. Fewer than a fifth of Americans have ever held digital assets or plan to do so in the near future, they point out. And that proportion has barely budged since 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. Crypto firms counter that banks don’t want to compete with companies that they claim are capable of offering the same services.

Crypto firms are also seeking bank charters, and receiving them at a blistering pace. World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm partly owned by Trump and his family, already received preliminary approval for an affiliate to operate a national trust bank. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has approved about 22 limited bank charters since Trump took office in 2025, including for Circle, Paxos and BitGo.

“Crypto’s great victory was winning permission to become banks, which is a strange trophy for a movement founded on disintermediation,” said Sultan Meghji, former chief innovation officer at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. during the first Trump administration. “Banks lost the narrative and quietly won the substance.”

Read More: Trump’s Family Joins the Sprint to Get a National Bank Charter