How Far Crypto Has Come in Washington

Collin McCune
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I’ve been reading the postmortems on Clarity, and some of the criticism is fair. Clarity is the industry’s biggest legislative priority. We worked hard on it. And it hasn’t passed the Senate. That’s a setback, and it deserves serious accounting. But much of the commentary describes an industry that made a huge effort in Washington and came away empty-handed.

You have to leave out a lot of the story to tell it that way.

Less than three years ago, a founder building a crypto company in America faced a basic question: am I going to be allowed to do this?

And it was a reasonable question. The SEC was suing major companies across the industry, there was no workable framework for ensuring these projects could comply with the law, and the official position was that everyone already had all the rules they needed. Builders had few options. They could hire more lawyers, leave the United States, or both.

The industry had already been through the fight over sweeping crypto tax-reporting provisions in the 2021 infrastructure bill. Then FTX turned out to be a spectacular fraud, and people who had nothing to do with it spent the next year explaining that blockchain technology had nothing to do with it. Founders headed overseas. Trying to persuade Washington to work on crypto regulation in that environment went about as well as you’d expect.

The goal has always been simple: establish clear rules so people can build here and customers are protected.

The industry has been working toward that goal for the better part of a decade. For much of that time, simply getting taken seriously in Washington was a project. So the community built the capacity to do something about it: policy teams, political operations, coalitions. Founders came to Washington to explain the fundamentals of blockchain networks to people who mostly knew crypto from its worst headlines.

There was nothing inevitable about what followed. And yet that work produced significant results.

Start with stablecoins. The U.S. now has a federal law governing their issuance, with requirements for the companies behind them and protections for customers. GENIUS is law, other countries are following suit, and agencies are working through implementation. We’ve gone from debating whether Washington would ever pass meaningful crypto legislation to working through how a major crypto law gets implemented.

That’s just the most visible achievement. Last year, Congress also overturned the IRS’s DeFi broker rule, a data collection mandate that was essentially impossible for blockchain software to comply with. The SEC also rescinded SAB 121, removing a major accounting obstacle to institutions holding crypto for customers, and FinCEN just withdrew the dangerous “Unhosted Wallet Rule”. These were threats and barriers that companies were spending time and money figuring out how to live with. They’re now gone.

Then there’s the proactive work happening at the agencies. The SEC has proposed a framework for raising money through token offerings and new rules for safeguarding crypto assets. It has issued an exemption allowing certain tokenized stocks to trade onchain. The CFTC just proposed a path for regulating centralized exchanges. And the SEC and CFTC have provided guidance on how existing law applies to crypto assets, helping to answer questions of critical importance to the industry, such as: How do you launch a token? How can it trade? Who can hold assets for customers, and what obligations should they have?

These are some of the very questions the industry spent years trying to get Washington to answer. They’re also central to the effort behind Clarity.

The House has now passed comprehensive crypto market structure legislation twice, with bipartisan support: FIT21 in 2024 and Clarity in 2025. And a great deal of that work is moving forward through agency proposals, guidance, and exemptions, even though the bill isn’t law. The U.S. government is working out the conditions under which crypto projects can operate safely here, which was the point all along — and still is.

There is an obvious limitation here. Proposed rules aren’t final. Guidance and exemptions only go so far. A company making a ten-year investment would understandably like to know that the rules won’t depend on the outcome of every presidential election. That is a big part of why the industry pushed so hard for Clarity. Legislation can settle questions agencies can’t settle on their own and give companies a foundation that lasts beyond whoever happens to be in charge.

The job isn’t finished. Getting legislation signed into law is hard, even when there is broad agreement that it’s needed. We need rules that companies can count on for the long-term, whether through durable rulemaking or legislation. We’ll continue to push for Clarity and other laws that set clear rules and protect consumers.

Not long ago, founders were making plans around the possibility that they couldn’t stay in America. That’s not the case anymore. We have a federal stablecoin law and regulators are at work writing a raft of sensible rules for everyone to follow.

Now we need to make sure the progress lasts. That is a problem to solve. It is also a very different problem from the one we had three years ago.


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