
David Nage says the CLARITY Act could hit the Senate floor in July. The ethics provision remains the sticking point. If unresolved before recess, the window for 2026 closes.
The CLARITY Act could reach the U.S. Senate floor in mid-to-late July, according to David Nage, managing director and portfolio manager at Arca. The bill, which passed the House and the Senate Banking Committee with bipartisan support, is now held up by a narrow ethics provision.
Nage said after a week of meetings with Senate offices and staffers in Washington that the policy debate is 80–85% finished. The remaining hurdle is a conflict-of-interest clause that would bar senior government officials from profiting from crypto business during their tenure.
“The sticking point is the ethics provision, the conflict-of-interest language meant to bar senior officials from profiting from the industry they regulate,” Nage said.
He described the disagreement as no longer a policy issue but a political one. “Nobody around that table is actually arguing about whether senior officials should be allowed to mint tokens while in office. They’re arguing about enforcement teeth and, underneath that, about optics.”
Nage proposed a clean, across-the-board prohibition on crypto business activity applying to the President, the Vice President, the entire senior executive branch, and all of Congress, with no exceptions. “Make it about the office, not the officeholder,” he wrote.
The stablecoin yield provision, once a major point of contention, is no longer a live obstacle, Nage said. The banking industry’s opposition has effectively run its course. “The staffers I met simply do not treat yield as a live obstacle anymore,” he wrote. “The compromise even ships with a multi-agency study on deposit impact.”
Nage’s base case assumes a compromise on ethics language before the July recess. Congress returns on July 13. After that, a Senate floor vote could come in mid-to-late July.
If no resolution is reached before the recess, the practical window for 2026 closes. “We’ll get it next Congress could quietly become we’ll get it next decade,” Nage warned. Senator Cynthia Lummis also flagged the risk that if the bill fails to pass this Congress, it could be delayed to 2030.
The next concrete marker is the recess deadline. If the ethics language is settled before July 13, the vote window opens. If not, the bill likely waits until the next Congress.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.