Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink may be the sentiment of the crypto industry, lobbyists and lawmakers who’ve spent the last year trying to get the CLARITY Act over the line.

No shortage of negotiations, amendments or political wrangling; yet not enough to get the bill moving through the Senate.

The CLARITY Act may have rammed into a Senate-shaped hurdle this week, but it isn’t dead on arrival yet — let’s go with walking wounded.

There’s still a chance for the digital asset market structure bill to scramble together the 60 votes it needs to clear the Senate.

When Republican Senator Thom Tillis switched his vote from yes to no at the last minute, he did so on procedural grounds. It may have looked like a swing against CLARITY, but it was really a parliamentary maneuver, allowing him to file a motion to reconsider and preserve a route back to the Senate floor.

The Crypto Council for Innovation (CCI)’s director of US federal affairs, Ryan Eagan, tells Magazine:

“Senator Tillis’s motion to reconsider would provide an opportunity to revisit CLARITY’s cloture vote at any point this session. Specific timing regarding next steps is not clear, but that desire to preserve that opportunity is in part due to the progress made over the past week.”

But the Senate is running out of time; both Democrats and Republicans remain divided over ethics provisions involving President Donald Trump, and even supporters of the bill say a more bipartisan negotiating process may now be necessary.

So can CLARITY still be resuscitated, and if it can, how much of the bill will need serious CPR to get there?

CLARITY isn’t dead, but the clock is running down

The failed cloture vote, a procedural vote to end debate on a bill and move it toward a final vote, doesn’t end CLARITY’s journey through Congress just yet. It requires 60 votes in the Senate, and CLARITY fell 49-50 on Tuesday.

Tillis’ motion to reconsider means the vote can be revisited during the current session, but that route is running into a much more practical problem: a ticking clock.

Related: Coinbase faces greater fallout from CLARITY Act setback: Saxo

The Senate is scheduled to leave for recess on October 2 before returning after the midterm elections, and the House of Representatives has already recessed for the election period, complicating any attempt to move legislation through both chambers before the end of the year.

Congressman Shri Thanedar, a Democrat who supported CLARITY when it passed through the House in July 2025, tells Magazine that timeline presents a “major barrier” to reaching an agreement:

“There are only 20 legislative days left in this Congress, all of them after the midterms, making odds of a 2026 compromise, unfortunately, very low.”

Very low doesn’t mean impossible, and the crypto industry has a precedent in the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation in US Stablecoins (GENIUS) bill, which failed cloture 48-49 in May 2025 before clearing a second cloture vote 66-32 just 11 days later. It passed the Senate the following month. However, Kyle Chassé, founder of crypto investment firm MV Global, tells Magazine:

“GENIUS came back from a failed cloture in 11 days. But GENIUS had a deal. This one has a calendar and no votes. Miss Jan. 3, and it restarts from zero in 2027 with a House that is probably Democratic.”

While a lame-duck session after the November elections could give CLARITY another shot, that’s not the same as having a ready-made deal waiting to go.

The 60-vote problem is a negotiating problem

Of the 49 votes for CLARITY, not a single one came from the Democratic camp. Chassé says:

“Every one of the 49 was a Republican. Zero Democrats voted to even open debate.”

While that’s clearly less than ideal, it doesn’t necessarily mean the Democrats have abandoned the bill entirely.

On Wednesday, seven Democratic senators — all of whom had voted a day earlier against advancing the bill — said they “remain committed” to enacting the legislation. Among them was Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, who backed moving the bill out of the Banking Committee in May before voting no on cloture. She said it’s “clear that now is the time to regulate digital assets” and that she’s willing to negotiate over the ethics provisions, adding:

“We were ready to strike a deal today and in discussions right up until the vote. Republican leadership shut it down at the very last minute after it became clear that we were on a path to a successful vote.”

Tillis said Wednesday he now wants to “convince the Democrats to get on board,” and “put pressure on them to own it,” and his procedural vote switch was designed to keep that possibility alive. “I feel very strongly that this is an unregulated marketplace and that we need some guardrails on,” he added.

Related: Bernstein expects ‘aggressive’ rulemaking from SEC, CFTC, following CLARITY Act failure

The divide isn’t over whether Congress should establish rules for crypto anymore, but whether the current package goes far enough to secure bipartisan support.

Seven Democratic senators “remain committed” to enacting the legislation. Source: Kirsten Gillibrand, Senate

While Congressman Thanedar says he supports the bill in its current form, he acknowledges that Tuesday’s result shows the need for both parties to work together further on the draft:

“I do believe that the failed CLARITY vote on Tuesday demonstrates that a more bipartisan drafting process would lead to a higher likelihood of creating the bipartisan, supermajority coalition that passing this legislation into law would require.”

If saving CLARITY means rewriting it, what survives?

Chassé says the problem has moved beyond the technical drafting of crypto policy and is now centered on President Trump’s crypto interests and the ethics provisions around them:

“This stopped being a drafting problem. It’s a referendum on the President’s crypto holdings six weeks before an election, and the text as written can’t survive that.”

Republicans had already made 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats ahead of Tuesday’s vote, including tighter restrictions on public officials profiting from crypto ventures, and giving state attorneys general a role in enforcing some of the ethics provisions.

Alsobrooks votes no on CLARITY. Source: Angela Alsobrooks, Senate.

Despite the concessions, Thanedar says the Democrats want more restrictions “on the President’s ability to use his office for personal gain.” He says the at least $1.4 billion in crypto earnings Trump reported for 2025 in his annual financial disclosure shows that “guardrails are necessary to both hold the President accountable and protect the long-term health of the digital asset market.”

Ethics is not the only potential fault line, though, and Chassé says the industry “should stop dying on that hill.” He points instead to stablecoin rewards, saying “some kind of cap or circuit breaker on yield” would likely be “the price of the bank-side senators and a chunk of Democrats,” along with “tighter illicit finance and state enforcement language.”

He says self-custody and developer protections are areas the crypto industry should be reluctant to trade away. Those protections have been bitterly defended throughout the negotiations, with lawmakers and industry groups debating how far the bill should go in shielding non-custodial developers from financial and anti-money-laundering (AML) requirements.

Congress may stall, crypto regulation doesn’t have to

Even if CLARITY remains stuck in Congress, US crypto regulation is not standing still. Eagan says the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have “demonstrated commitment to reduce uncertainty” through guidance, rulemaking, no-action relief and exemptions.

“CCI expects that agencies’ crypto agenda will proceed in robust fashion regardless of the CLARITY Act,” he says, adding that the GENIUS Act implementation continues at Treasury and the banking regulators.

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor also pointed out that the SEC, CFTC and Treasury could continue to advance rules under existing laws:

“Progress need not wait for Congress.”

That may be true, but agency action is not the same as getting CLARITY over the finish line. Regulatory guidance can be swept out with administrations, but legislation is harder to unwind.

CLARITY may still have a way to limp back to the Senate, but whether lawmakers can find 60 votes without changing the bill beyond recognition is another matter.

Magazine: Revolut ID thefts highlight KYC’s dangers: Here’s how to fix it

Real-world asset futures trading has climbed from $760 million to $107.6 billion in nine months as commodities, equities and pre-IPO contracts have taken a larger share of on-chain derivatives activity.

RWA futures have matched crypto trading volume

OKX and Token Terminal said in a joint report that the change followed the Oct. 10, 2025 liquidation event, when more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto futures positions were wiped out across 1.6 million accounts.

The one-day total was about nine times larger than the previous record, according to the report. Bitcoin, Ether and Solana futures lost part of their share after the sell-off, while contracts linked to commodities, public companies and private firms attracted more trading activity.

Nine months later, total open interest across the futures market had moved above its October level, although the assets supporting that recovery had changed. Open interest measures the value of contracts that remain active and can help distinguish sustained positioning from volume created by positions that traders open and close quickly.

Monthly RWA futures volume increased from $760 million in October to $107.6 billion in July, a 142-fold rise. Crypto futures recorded $105.7 billion during July, placing the two categories at roughly the same scale for the first time in the period covered by the report.

“A single day in October 2025 reset trading in crypto [futures] contracts,” the report said, adding that growth in RWA contracts came from oil, silver, semiconductor, memory-chip and pre-IPO markets rather than the crypto cycle.

While Bitcoin, Ether and Solana remained major futures markets, the data showed that the recovery in sector-wide open interest did not simply restore the market mix that existed before the liquidation event. Contracts tied to assets outside crypto supplied a growing portion of the activity.

Oil and chip contracts have followed real-world events

Trading patterns also differed by the type of asset referenced in each contract, according to OKX and Token Terminal. Instead of moving mainly with Bitcoin or other crypto assets, several RWA futures markets reacted to news affecting their underlying commodities and companies.

Following strikes on Iran, daily volume in a West Texas Intermediate oil contract increased 149-fold within nine days. The report tied the move to the repricing of oil as traders responded to supply concerns and geopolitical risk.

Commodities became the largest RWA futures segment in January and accounted for 70% of category volume in March. Their share later fell to 14% by July as activity moved toward equity-linked contracts.

Semiconductor and memory-related futures led the next change. Monthly volume across four chip and memory names rose from $600 million to $45.3 billion as memory prices increased, according to the report.

By July, equities had become the largest part of the RWA futures category, with semiconductor-linked contracts leading the segment. The change followed an earlier period in late 2025 when index products accounted for the most activity.

Each category gained volume alongside developments in the market it tracked, the researchers said. Oil contracts responded to geopolitical events, while semiconductor contracts drew activity during the memory shortage and related price increases.

“Trading activity increasingly reflects developments in the underlying assets referenced by each contract,” the report said.

Open interest and participant data also indicated that the increase involved positions held beyond brief bursts of trading, according to the researchers. Their findings linked the growth to both the addition of new asset types and liquidity supplied by participants trading outside the main crypto contracts.

Pre-IPO futures have added $10.9B in monthly volume

Private-company contracts supplied another source of growth, with pre-IPO futures reaching $10.9 billion in monthly volume within three months of the first listing.

SpaceX led the category during the period examined by OKX and Token Terminal. Pre-IPO perpetual futures allow traders to take positions linked to a private company’s valuation without purchasing its shares.

As crypto.news reported in June, Coinbase introduced a SpaceX-linked perpetual contract with leverage of up to five times. The product traded around the clock, settled gains and losses in USDC, and was designed to convert into a standard perpetual contract if SpaceX completed a public listing.

Coinbase said the contract provided price exposure rather than equity ownership. Holders received no shares, voting rights or direct claim on the private company, a distinction that also applies to the way investors should assess pre-IPO derivatives against traditional private-market holdings.

The exchange also warned that valuation-based index pricing, limited liquidity and IPO conversion terms could expose traders to sharp price moves and liquidations. At the time of its launch, the product was unavailable in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, India and Australia.

Before SpaceX shares entered public markets, on-chain derivatives had already allowed traders to price the company through synthetic contracts. A July examination found that a SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual market had launched through Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework in May, weeks before the stock existed.

The $10.9 billion monthly figure in the OKX and Token Terminal report showed how quickly such products attracted volume, but the contracts represented price exposure rather than ownership in SpaceX or another private company.

US access has depended on the regulatory structure

For U.S. traders, the growth of RWA futures does not mean every contract counted in the report is available through domestic platforms. Product access depends on where a venue operates, how the contract is structured, and whether the provider has the required regulatory status.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversees U.S. derivatives markets, including designated contract markets, clearing organizations and registered intermediaries. In May, CFTC staff issued guidance covering the obligations of regulated entities seeking to offer trading and clearing around the clock.

Coinbase’s SpaceX-linked pre-IPO product illustrated the difference between global availability and U.S. access. Although Coinbase operates in the country, the exchange excluded U.S. users from that specific contract while offering it in supported jurisdictions through Coinbase Advanced.

For American investors, buying a listed stock also differs from opening a perpetual futures position tied to the same company or asset. A share gives its holder an ownership interest in a company, while a cash-settled perpetual contract provides exposure to changes in a reference price and may involve leverage, funding payments, and forced liquidation.

RWA futures can also track several types of underlying markets, including oil, silver, stock indices, individual companies and private-company valuations. The OKX and Token Terminal data grouped those contracts by the assets they referenced, showing how category leadership moved from indices to commodities and later to equities during the nine-month period.

By July, commodity contracts represented 14% of RWA futures volume after controlling 70% in March. Equity contracts had taken the top position as trading in semiconductor and memory names rose to $45.3 billion, while pre-IPO markets had reached $10.9 billion within their first three months.

Day-one DEX volume on Arc finished at around $82 million, compared with the $878 million Robinhood Chain did on July 12, when its own institutional pitch was overtaken by memecoins and a cat token briefly hit a $156 million market cap. Arc’s largest token, ARGUS, is worth $16 million. Its second- and third-largest are cirBTC and EURC — Circle’s own products.

The sharper criticism is that Circle invited this. Rachel Mayer, Circle’s VP of product for Arc, posted an AI-generated image promoting DUKE, a memecoin, writing that it was Allaire’s dog. The post drew about 1 million views and a wave of hostile replies accusing Circle of shilling tokens to bootstrap its own network.

“You can clearly see a lot of their team fundamentally misunderstands meme culture,” wrote Abbas Khan. “Now it’s stuck in this weird middle ground where nobody really knows whether it’s supposed to be a meme chain or a corporate stablecoin chain.”

Circle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The chain itself is performing as designed, with half-second blocks being processed with no congestion, and DeFi platforms like Aave and Morpho live. But waning sentiment has led to feelings of frustration from the memecoin crowd, despite speculative token activity driving most of the day-one volume.

Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $76,500 after Thursday’s Wall Street open as investors snapped up US stocks following their recent dip.

Key points:

• Bitcoin consolidated after dropping below $76,000 on the back of a 0.25% interest-rate hike by the US Federal Reserve. 
• US equities rebounded, with the Nasdaq Composite Index gaining 1.5% as analysis saw upside continuation.
• Bitcoin price analysis retained its bullish slant on market conditions, with CryptoQuant’s Bull Score Index circling 60/100 on Thursday.

Bitcoin halts losses as US stocks turn green

Data from TradingView showed that BTC price volatility was cooling over the last 24 hours, with only modest moves to take nearby liquidity. 

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

Data from CoinGlass showed both bid and ask liquidity thickening around the current spot price, a typical feature of rangebound trading conditions.

BTC/USDT liquidation heatmap (Binance). Source: CoinGlass

US equities gained on the day, as investors sought to capitalize on the local downside that followed policy tightening by the US Federal Reserve. The S&P 500 Index and tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index gained 0.9% and 1.5%, respectively.

Nasdaq Composite Index one-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

On Wednesday, the Fed voted to increase benchmark interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75-4%. This was its first hike since July 2023, and signaled an end to three years of easing in which the Fed either cut rates or held them in the same range between meetings.

Commenting, trading resource The Kobeissi Letter suggested that assets would continue to perform strongly despite the prospect of lower-liquidity conditions associated with the rate hikes. As Cointelegraph reported, central-bank rates are notching higher globally, as the European Central Bank hiked by 0.25% last week and the Bank of Japan is expected to follow suit on Friday.

“The asset owner economy just keeps getting better,” it wrote in a post on X, referencing the day’s gains in the Nasdaq.

Analysis sees BTC price trend “cooling, not turning”

Bitcoin also enjoyed relief after falling to new month-to-date lows on Tuesday. At the time of writing, BTC/USD traded 0.5% higher on the day.

Related: Bitcoin treasuries buy just 5.9K BTC in three months as paper losses linger

Commenting on the current market landscape, onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant described macro conditions as a hurdle to the continuation of Bitcoin’s previous rebound that totaled 25% in August.

“The trend is still bullish, but momentum and macro are working against it near-term,” head of research Julio Moreno wrote in its latest weekly report sent to Cointelegraph.

Moreno noted that one of CryptoQuant’s proprietary indicators tracking BTC price cycles, the Bull Score Index, had dropped from 80 to 60 — the cut-off point for what it describes as “bullish conditions.”

“Bitcoin is cooling, not turning. A Bull Score of 60 keeps the trend bullish, but fading US demand, rising altcoin inflows, and a week of macro risk — the delay of the CLARITY Act and a likely Fed hike — argue for consolidation. Watch $70K and $62K–$65K as support,” the report summarized.

Bitcoin Bull Score Index. Source: CryptoQuant