Full agreement on every detail is rare for legislation of this scope, and a handful of loose ends inevitably remained. But what ultimately held the bill up was ethics, specifically the risk of conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government. The United States gains little from a crypto sector widely perceived as rife with corruption and self-dealing, and safeguarding public trust is crucial.
Even so, it was a mistake to sacrifice the Clarity Act on the altar of ethics, because other legislative avenues for addressing such concerns would have stayed open even if the bill had passed.
Underlying all of this is a question of fairness. Nearly every other part of American finance operates within a defined regulatory perimeter, where firms know which rules bind them and which regulator enforces compliance. Crypto has no such perimeter written into law. Elsewhere, many developed economies—from the European Union and the United Kingdom to Japan and Singapore —have established one. International precedent should not dictate American policy, but it is instructive that so many others have already settled this.
The next Congress must finish what its predecessors did not. For nearly a decade, crypto regulation has been painstakingly pushed up the hill, only to tumble back down again. Sisyphus, at least, had earned his fate. He betrayed the gods and cheated death twice over. Whatever crypto’s faults, it does not warrant a sentence like his.
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