Twenty-five percent. That’s the number investment bank TD Securities put on the crypto market structure bill’s chances in a note published Monday, and it’s the kind of figure that reframes everything else you’ve heard about the Clarity Act this summer.
Flip it around and the framing gets blunter. “The bill is not dead, but the path forward is harder,” the bank said. “We assign a 75% probability that Clarity fails to become law this fall.”
That’s not a prediction of death. It’s a prediction of stalling, which in the Senate amounts to roughly the same outcome on a calendar this tight.
The delay that moved the math
Lawmakers wanted a vote on the long-awaited crypto market structure bill before a five-week recess. Last week the news landed that it wouldn’t happen. The Senate now votes in September, after members return from August recess.
TD Securities cited that delay, plus potential stalling from the Democrats, as the basis for its call. The bill won’t pass before the summer, the bank said, leaving it a 25% chance in September.
How it fails, specifically
The interesting part of the note isn’t the probability. It’s that TD Cowen sketched a mechanism.
One likely outcome: cloture passes initially in September, then Republicans block Democratic amendments on the ethics and anti-money-laundering sections, and Democrats respond by sinking the second cloture vote. Cloture is the Senate’s procedural tool for ending debate on a bill so it can move to a final vote. It takes two of them to matter, and the second is where this one dies in that scenario.
The bank added another likely path: no cloture vote ever happens at all. No dramatic floor fight, no amendment standoff. The bill simply never gets called.
The ethics language cuts both ways
The latest draft, which started circulating in July, contains language banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto. Democrats and Republicans drafted it together.
That’s the sort of provision meant to defuse the objection. It hasn’t. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has criticized the Clarity Act from the beginning, and other Democrats have claimed the new legislation will benefit the president and his family.
Note where the ethics section sits in TD Cowen’s failure scenario. It’s one of the two areas where Republicans are expected to block amendments. The clause written to answer the criticism is also the clause the fight runs through.
Who wants this and why it hasn’t been enough
The support behind the bill is broader than the usual crypto lobby. Goldman Sachs and Fidelity have backed it. So have law enforcement groups. Bipartisan work went into the legislation, and the House of Representatives passed it last year.
None of that has produced a Senate vote. Some Republicans have accused Democrats of stalling the bill, which is the polite version of admitting the votes aren’t there yet.
If it passes, the Clarity Act would be a federal rulebook for U.S. cryptocurrency markets. That’s the whole pitch, and it’s why the industry has spent so long on it.
What to watch in September
Track the first cloture vote, not the headlines around it. Under TD Cowen’s own scenario, that vote can succeed and the bill can still fail weeks later on the second one, so a green light in early September proves less than it appears.
The tell will be whether Democratic amendments on ethics and AML get floor time. If they don’t, the bank’s 75% starts looking conservative.
