Crypto

Crypto and Banks Take Their Lobbying War to the States Ahead of Tuesday's CLARITY Vote

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 13, 2026

The fight over America's crypto market structure bill has left Washington and gone home for the weekend. With the Senate scheduled to vote Tuesday on the CLARITY Act, both the crypto industry and the banking lobby are spending the recess pressuring senators in their home states, Reuters reported. It is a rare legislative battle where both sides are treating one bill as the defining fight of the decade, and the grassroots energy is the story.

The crypto camp is running a full mobilization. The Blockchain Association's CEO Summer Mersinger has been urging supporters to keep the pressure up, while the Stand With Crypto alliance has members writing opinion pieces calling on senators like Kentucky's Rand Paul to back the bill. Crypto companies argue the act delivers legal certainty that keeps jobs and capital in the United States, with Kentucky chapter president Jason Dodson arguing that legal chaos drives talent and innovation offshore.

The banks are matching that energy dollar for dollar. The Independent Community Bankers of America has been mobilizing its members to meet senators in their home offices, and the group has been airing television commercials in Washington and target states claiming that crypto ranks at the very bottom of issues voters care about. It even ran an ad during the U.S. Open tennis tournament pushing to fix the bill and protect Main Street lending. When bankers buy sports ad inventory, you know the stakes feel existential.

The substance of the fight has shifted in the bill's latest draft. Senate Republicans released a 630 page updated text on Thursday that includes a change to stablecoin rewards and yield provisions, a move the crypto industry has loudly decried. White House official Patrick Witt responded on X with a pointed suggestion that banks should take the deal being offered on stablecoin rewards and yield, adding that for every provision giving anyone heartburn, the draft offers several pieces of candy. Compromise, in other words, is the whole game.

But the updated draft also contains a genuine win for builders. It includes language protecting developers of self custody software from prosecution under money transmitting laws, a direct response to cases like Tornado Cash co founder Roman Storm, convicted last year and now appealing, and the Samourai Wallet developers, who pleaded guilty and received five year sentences. For years, the legal theory behind those prosecutions threatened the premise of decentralized finance itself, since the protocols themselves stayed entirely out of custody of user funds. Writing developer protections into federal law would be a landmark.

The math on Tuesday is tight. Passing the bill needs 60 votes, which means at least seven Democrats joining a united Republican caucus. Polymarket traders currently give the CLARITY Act only a 16 percent chance of becoming law this year, down from 82 percent in February. Yet even the bill's skeptics acknowledge the fallback: the SEC and CFTC have vowed to write their own market structure rules if Congress stalls, so clarity of some kind is coming either way.

Here is the encouraging read. Whatever you think of the bill's compromises, this is American crypto growing up in public: hiring lobbyists, buying ads, writing op eds, and fighting for developer protections in the same arena as the banking industry. A decade ago the industry held little sway in these rooms. On Tuesday it gets a floor vote. Readers who hold crypto should watch the vote count closely, because the margin will tell you exactly how much political muscle this industry has built.

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