SBSB FinTech Lawyers’ Yuliya Barabash on what the stalled US crypto bill means for founders, compliance teams and institutional players
Does the CLARITY Act create a real counterweight to Europe’s MiCA, or an isolated American regulatory island?
Start with the status, because it matters: as of early August, CLARITY still isn’t law. It passed the House in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May, but it’s stuck short of the 60 votes it needs, and prediction markets now put 2026 passage at around 30% (down from roughly 48% in June–July and 82% in February).So any “counterweight” is still conditional.
If it does pass, CLARITY and MiCA solve different problems, which makes a head-to-head comparison a little misleading. MiCA is one framework across 27 member states, and one compliant issuer gets a passport to the entire EU. Its strength is regulatory certainty at scale.
CLARITY settles federal jurisdiction over digital assets but leaves the state-level money-transmission regimes largely intact. It layers compliance rather than eliminating it, which is the exact thing MiCA set out to fix.
Where the US wins is depth. The world’s largest asset managers, derivatives markets, and custody networks are all USD-denominated. If CLARITY gives tokenized securities and stablecoins enough legal clarity to operate confidently inside that infrastructure, it doesn’t need to copy MiCA’s architecture to compete.
The real risk isn’t an isolated “American island.” It’s cost. Running compliance across both frameworks at once could push mid-tier issuers to drop a dual presence, splitting global liquidity between dollar- and euro-denominated markets.
What this means for founders: don’t try to be MiCA-native and CLARITY-native at the same time from day one. Most companies can’t afford it. Pick your primary market based on where your users and capital actually are, get fully compliant there, and treat the second market as a phase-two expansion with its own budget. If you’re a US issuer, your near-term work isn’t Brussels. It’s mapping the state-by-state money-transmission layer that CLARITY leaves untouched.
How do compliance teams prepare for a framework that must satisfy both the banking lobby’s stablecoin fears and Democrats’ ethics rules on officials’ crypto holdings?
Most compliance departments aren’t waiting for the final text. When the direction is clear but the details are still being negotiated, building ahead of the mandate is far cheaper than rebuilding after it. And the ethics piece is exactly why CLARITY is stalled right now, so this isn’t hypothetical.
The deposit-flight concern is the simpler of the two. The banking lobby’s core fear isn’t really about reserves, it’s disintermediation. If dollars can sit in a stablecoin that behaves like a deposit, that money migrates out of the banking system and shrinks the deposit base banks rely on to lend. The reserve-requirement asymmetry makes that migration easier and, from the banks’ view, unfair, since stablecoins offer deposit-like functionality without the same prudential obligations. But the flight of deposits itself is the structural threat, and it’s precisely why banks are lobbying so hard for restrictions. Compliance teams are already responding on the reserve side: tightening disclosures and building attestation infrastructure, much of it shaped by the GENIUS Act stablecoin rules already on the books.
The ethics provisions are far more complicated. Restrictions on elected officials’ personal holdings don’t just add paperwork, they introduce personnel risk. Any institution with co-investment arrangements or token allocations involving people who later move into public service needs a conflict-of-interest screening layer that most frameworks simply don’t have today.
The fix isn’t exciting: map every public-private relationship against the most aggressive version of the proposed restrictions, and build the disclosure infrastructure before anyone asks for it.
The two demands pull in opposite directions. The banking lobby wants conservatism: stable reserves, predictable redemptions, and a slower path for deposits to leave the system. The ethics provisions demand relationship transparency the industry has historically kept out of regulatory filings. Firms that treat both as permanent features of the landscape, rather than political conditions to wait out, will be better positioned when the final text lands.
If Democrats write strict trading bans and disclosures for federal officials into the final text, how do compliance teams manage public-private collaboration, and could it dampen institutional participation?
The numbers changed the politics. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure, made public on July 1 , reported roughly $1.4 billion in crypto income, split fairly evenly between World Liberty Financial token sales and memecoin royalties.
That gave Democrats a concrete basis for their amendments, and it’s the single clause the bill is now stuck on. Strict trading bans and mandatory disclosures for federal officials are no longer a fringe demand. They’ve become the likely price of passing any bill at all.
For compliance departments, the first pressure point is talent. Traditional finance has long leaned on recruiting former government officials for their regulatory relationships. If trading bans apply retroactively, that pipeline narrows, and firms that built their regulatory strategy around those relationships will have to rethink how they source signal.
The deeper issue is token allocation. Any firm that gave special access to individuals who later entered public service will face scrutiny if the disclosure rules include look-back provisions. Identifying that exposure now, before the text locks, is the only pragmatic move.
Whether this dampens institutional participation depends on the form the rules take. Disclosure alone won’t trouble large institutions; they already live under extensive SEC and FINRA reporting. Outright trading bans are a different matter, because they cut off the informal conversations firms rely on to read where regulation is heading before it’s written. Larger firms with legal teams can absorb that. Smaller players who depend on relationships more than in-house counsel will feel it.
