'Not the end': Sen. Gillibrand says Democrats still committed to passing Clarity Act

Seven U.S. Democratic Senators stated on Wednesday that they remain committed to passing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

"This week was a setback, but not the end of that important work," U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said in the Wednesday statement.

The statement highlighted that the Democrats have worked for two years to pass crypto legislation that would "expand opportunity, protect consumers, punish bad actors, create regulatory certainty, and include strong, commonsense ethics provisions for elected officials."

"We remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion to get this legislation passed," the senators wrote.

The latest statement follows Clarity's failure to pass the Senate's procedural vote on Tuesday, which led many to declare the bill "dead." While it needed 60 votes to pass, it only gained 49 yes votes. All seven Democratic Senators who were a part of the statement on Wednesday voted no.

Focus on regulators

While the U.S. Senate may continue to work on the legislation, financial analysts at StoneX said the bill is dead for this Congress, as there are only 14 working days left before the campaign season.

Instead, analysts at Bernstein said they expect the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to fill the regulatory gap by issuing "specific rule-making." These efforts may tackle key issues such as classification of native crypto tokens, protections for DeFi and self-custody infrastructure, and rules governing equity tokenization. 

JPMorgan analysts also said in their latest report that agency rulemaking could establish guardrails to "appease the crypto-ecosystem and instill some confidence into incremental capital flows," though it is less durable compared to legislative statutes.