THE WHITE HOUSE SAYS THE CLARITY ACT CAN WAIT AND THE REGULATORS CANNOT — “THERE’S NO TIME TO WASTE NOW” — THE BILL STAYS DEAD AND THE RULES GET WRITTEN ANYWAY

Patrick Witt, the White House crypto adviser, and Luke Pettit, the Treasury assistant secretary for financial institutions, spoke at a policy conference in Washington on September 22. A week after the Senate left the Clarity Act for dead, Witt asked: “Did we really need to drag that out for a year only to get a purely political result like that?” Pettit’s read on the bill’s chances in Congress: “the waters are incredibly chilled.”

Neither of them is waiting. “There’s no time to waste now,” Witt said, pointing at what the SEC and the CFTC have already done and saying the agencies hold “many” existing authorities they can use. He also said the quiet part: that path invites “legal challenges.” On the lame duck session, Witt said the election result “will motivate certain people or reduce motivation for others.”

Read what that means for the rulebook. A law passed by Congress is hard to undo. A rule written by an agency is undone by the next set of commissioners, and every rule written this way comes with a lawsuit attached. Pettit added that Treasury and the banking agencies are still drafting the rules for the GENIUS Act, while companies are already selling “GENIUS-compliant stablecoins” against rules that do not exist yet.

Michael Saylor called the bill’s death a win and said the industry should use the next two years. This is what the next two years look like: the people writing the rules are the people you have to lobby, and the rules last as long as they hold their jobs. Bitcoin did not need the bill and does not need the rules. The companies built on top of it need both. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $86,276.