Senate Kills Clarity Act, Crypto Calls It a Feature: Bitwise Spots 4 Winners 🏆

The U.S. Senate voted 49–50 on cloture on Sept. 15, falling 11 votes short of advancing the CLARITY Act, yet Bitcoin rose roughly 8% and Ether added about 7% over the following two weeks, according to Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan. In a Sept. 30 client memo titled "Why Crypto Rallied When Clarity Failed," Hougan wrote that "crypto sacrificed long-term certainty and got better rules, faster," pointing to the Securities and Exchange Commission's five-year innovation exemption and recent buyback guidance as delivering clearer frameworks than the stalled bill would have. The White House and Senator Cynthia Lummis attributed the failed cloture vote to Democrats.

NEAR climbed close to 104% and Uniswap jumped nearly 49% over the same two-week span, figures he cited as evidence the market read the bill's collapse as net positive for digital assets. Hougan identified four beneficiaries from the regulatory vacuum: exchanges that can continue distributing stablecoin rewards, incumbent platforms whose competitive moats remain intact, tokenization projects, and tokens tied to corporate repurchase programs.

The Senate's failure to advance the CLARITY Act leaves the existing patchwork of agency rulemaking and enforcement as the operative framework for U.S. crypto oversight, with the SEC's innovation exemption now serving as the primary vehicle for new product approvals. Hougan's memo frames the agency's exemption regime as a faster, more flexible path than the legislative route that stalled in the upper chamber.