Trump presses Congress for a 'fair version' of the Clarity Act

President Trump called on Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act at a White House meeting Wednesday with crypto and Wall Street executives, Unchained reported. He asked for a "fair version" of the bill, a phrase aimed squarely at the fight over its language that has kept it stalled in the Senate.

“Now we need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act, a fair version of the Clarity Act.”

— Donald Trump, President of the United States

Trump cast the legislation as a competitive weapon, saying it would keep the country ahead of China and open the door to the next wave of innovations. He criticized the previous administration's enforcement record and pointed to his own: the strategic bitcoin reserve, the digital asset stockpile, the ban on a US central bank digital currency, and the GENIUS Act.

The room included Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher, Kraken's Arjun Sethi, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith, Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and a16z crypto founder Chris Dixon. SEC Chair Paul Atkins, CFTC Chair Michael Selig, and White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt also joined.

• Senate votes needed: 60
• Republicans short by: roughly 7 Democrats
• Bill returns to the Senate floor: September, after the August recess
• Sticking point: Democratic demand for ethics limits on the president's crypto businesses

That vote math explains why Trump reached for the word "fair." Democratic negotiators want ethics limits covering the president's own crypto businesses written into the bill, the same fight that has held it up for months, and the bill returns to the floor in September without having cleared a procedural vote before the recess.

Armstrong made the industry's case in the room, calling the bill "a true bipartisan compromise" and saying it "would make all the progress that this administration has made durable into the future, so it could survive for decades and decades to come." Atkins tied the SEC's own crypto proposal from earlier this week to the same goal, arguing the agency's rule would give entrepreneurs certainty to raise capital in the US and that getting Clarity to the president's desk remains the priority.

The gathering came a day before the first meeting of the CFTC's new Innovation Advisory Committee, whose roster includes executives from Kraken, Anchorage Digital, Grayscale, and OKX. Prediction market operators Kalshi and Polymarket did not get an invitation to the White House event; Politico reported the administration wanted the day to stay focused on crypto. That framing puts Wednesday's meeting alongside other recent moves testing how far Washington will go to write crypto rules that the industry itself signs off on, including the Clarity Act fight banks and issuers are having over the same bill's stablecoin-yield provisions.

The bill would settle a question regulators and exchanges have argued over for years: whether a given token counts as a security under the SEC or a commodity under the CFTC, and which agency's rules apply to trading it. Exchanges have built compliance programs around that ambiguity rather than a clear rule, and executives in the room, several of whom run companies that would have to redesign parts of their compliance stack once a final rule lands, have pushed for the bill for that reason as much as for any broader policy argument. A version that ships without addressing the ethics-limits demand risks another round of the same stalemate that kept it off the floor through the summer.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.