The bigger picture of meme coin lawsuits
plus: CLARITY inches forward, jobs market, a peace rally and more
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IN THIS NEWSLETTER
The CLARITY Act inches forward
The bigger picture of meme coin lawsuits
Macro: JOLTS
Markets: a peace rally?
Term of the day: backwardation
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The CLARITY Act inches forward
It looks like a compromise has finally been reached on stablecoin yield portion of the CLARITY Act crypto market regulation, whose debate has been pushed well beyond the expected timeframe due to the banking sector’s attempt to limit any incentives for stablecoin use.
I say “looks like” because you never know in politics, and the banking lobbies are still saying the proposed wording “falls short”. But Senate Banking Committee members Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), responsible for the draft, have pretty much said that this is as far as they’ll go, that they “respectfully agree to disagree”. Crypto firms, including Coinbase which had pulled its support in April, have indicated they are on board.
The main points:
No interest on stablecoin balances
Activity-based rewards (such as for transactions) are allowed as long as they don’t mimic yield
Regulators have to come up with anti-evasion rules within one year.
Next, the Senate Banking Committee will fold this into the full draft and push it to markup, hopefully within the next couple of weeks. The clock is ticking – if there is no CLARITY Act vote before the summer recess, it’s probably off the table as the upcoming midterm elections will be sucking the air out of legislative energy in the runup to November. And if the Democrats take both the House and the Senate, then it’s not going to get passed.
There are still sticking points ahead – for instance, Senator Tillis has said that he won’t support the bill unless an ethics provision limiting how White House officials can use crypto is included. His fellow Republicans have pushed back on this, for reasons I don’t understand.
However, according to Polymarket, the odds are in CLARITY’s favour.
(chart via Polymarket)
This would be a very good thing. It won’t be a perfect bill, and there will be much in it that both crypto advocates and opponents hate. I’m personally particularly worried about a provision that says the SEC can’t craft exceptions – that is unusual and overly restrictive, especially for a technology that is still rapidly evolving.
But the security of a legal framework that can survive political shifts will bring more investment and more innovation, which will eventually seep through to the rest of the world as other jurisdictions realize that capital moves towards where it can best be put to use.
