Don’t let perfect be the enemy of Clarity

What is the proper role for a policymaker in setting rules for a rapidly developing technology? Too often, policymakers move slowly and the technology develops before proper rules can be put in place. And to be fair, legislation that puts guardrails around new technology without stunting its growth, while also protecting consumers, is not easy. But when a good-but-not-perfect bill is on the table to do just that, Congress should seize the opportunity and vote yes. That is exactly where we are on the eve of the Senate vote on Clarity.

When FTX collapsed in November 2022, I was a sitting commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. I watched as the government discovered billions of dollars of misappropriated customer funds. Reporters asked, again and again, what the CFTC could have done. The honest answer was: not enough. The Commission had anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority, but Congress had never given it explicit jurisdiction over digital asset spot markets. This gap is still open today, which means the protections Congress extends to existing securities and commodities still don't cover the majority of the types of digital assets.

Nearly four years later, we still haven’t solved this problem.

Summer Mersinger is CEO of the Blockchain Association and a former commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Given how contested this debate has become, it's worth pausing to consider what Clarity actually does. The bill draws a clear jurisdictional line between the SEC and the CFTC, so a platform and its customers both know which regulator has authority over it. Platforms serving American customers will need to register. Customer assets must be held separately from a platform's own operating funds — the kind of safeguard that failed at FTX. Issuers and exchanges will face disclosure requirements and conflict-of-interest rules governing how they handle assets in their custody, and regulators will have a statutory basis to enforce them, rather than stretching decades-old authorities to cover a market they were never written for and leaving the courts to determine whether those interpretations hold. Those are core features of the bill as written.

Getting to this point required the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committees to spend well over a year working through disputes over stablecoin rewards and illicit finance provisions, and some of that negotiation will likely continue after this initial procedural vote. The Senate faced a similar judgment call last year on the GENIUS Act, and Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat with real reservations about parts of that bill, articulated the right standard for deciding whether to support it: "It's not perfect, but it's far better than the status quo." The Senate passed GENIUS 68–30, and it was signed into law.

I think that’s a reasonable standard: first, do no harm; second, meaningfully improve on the status quo; third, give consumers the protections they deserve. Critics of the bill have framed their objections in similar terms. But at some point, calls for further improvements can become a vehicle for indefinite delay – and the status quo prevails.

The demand for action extends far beyond Washington. Through ClarityForAmerica.com, more than 1,000 Americans from across the country have signed a coalition letter to Senate leadership urging the Senate to advance Clarity.

Creating durable legislation rarely means waiting for the perfect bill, particularly when technology and markets are moving this fast. It means ensuring the law keeps pace with the activity it is meant to govern. Washington has fallen behind before, with real consequences for people who assumed protections existed when they did not — as the collapse of FTX made painfully clear. On September 15, the Senate has the chance to show that it can address issues in a reasonable timeframe, rather than waiting for the next market failure to act. This framework will continue to be refined for years, as it should. What's in front of the Senate now is the next step in that process, and it has been a long time coming.