Why SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce Is Confident the CLARITY Act Can Pass
Commissioner Peirce says now is the time for crypto regulation — whether it comes from Congress, or not
By Zack Guzman
September 12, 2026
Washington has spent years promising the crypto industry that regulatory clarity was coming.
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce thinks the wait may finally be close to over.
With the Senate preparing for a crucial procedural vote on the CLARITY Act on Tuesday, Commissioner Peirce told Coinage she remains optimistic that lawmakers can finally push comprehensive crypto market structure legislation across the finish line — even after repeated delays raised fresh doubts about whether Congress could get it done.
“I’m still excited to see the bill get across the finish line,” Peirce said, with her comments echoing a similar boost of optimism coming from White House Digital Assets advisor Patrick Witt.
Witt tweeted over the weekend, "Bad day to be a Clarity Act doomer." Odds on some betting sites that the CLARITY Act gets signed into law this year rebounded from lows of 14% to as high as 23% over the weekend.
The Senate will need 60 votes to advance the CLARITY Act, which sets out rules for tokenization in America. In order to pass, Republicans will need Democratic support at a moment when disagreements over ethics provisions, decentralized finance, and the relationship between banks and crypto companies remain unresolved.
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Senate Republicans released a revised 630-page version of the bill this week after incorporating more than 100 provisions requested by Democrats, but reporting suggests its path remains far from certain. Peirce, however, sees something that may matter more than any single sticking point: momentum.
“There are a lot of issues that are yet to be worked out,” she acknowledged. But she pointed to the months of negotiations already poured into the legislation and the broader regulatory work underway at both the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission as evidence that Washington has moved well beyond the debate over whether crypto deserves its own regulatory framework.
The debate now is over what that framework should look like. That represents a remarkable change from the environment Peirce spent much of her tenure criticizing.
For years, Peirce was one of the SEC’s loudest dissenters on crypto policy, repeatedly arguing that regulators were leaving legitimate projects without a practical path to operate in the United States. Now, as she prepares to leave the Commission, many of the concepts she once pushed from the minority are beginning to shape actual policy.
The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act in a bipartisan 15-9 vote in May. The legislation seeks to establish clearer jurisdiction between the SEC and CFTC and create a federal market structure for digital assets.
For Peirce, the importance of Congress finishing the job comes down to one word: permanence. But just as Witt told Coinage last month, even if the CLARITY Act vote fails, the SEC is waiting in the wings to advance its own pro-crypto agenda.
“We’ve been saying all along, the SEC has authority already to do a lot in the crypto space,” Peirce said. “Using that authority to start establishing some rules within which people can do fundraising using tokens makes sense.”
The Commission has already begun doing exactly that. Peirce pointed to guidance, no-action letters, exemptions, work around crypto custody and the SEC’s emerging regulatory framework for token fundraising as examples of changes the agency can pursue regardless of what happens in Congress.
“There’s no end of things that we can do using our existing authority,” she said.
But CLARITY obviously still matters for the permanence of the change. Commissioner Peirce conceded that a new SEC Chair or administration could undo changes at the agency level down the road.
“I think that really is the ultimate tool for us because it does establish something that… gives it a sense of permanence,” Peirce said of the CLARITY Act.
That concern has taken on added significance after crypto spent years watching policy swing dramatically depending on who controlled the SEC and White House.
The industry’s experience under former SEC Chair Gary Gensler demonstrated how much can change when the interpretation of existing securities laws changes. The current Commission has moved sharply in the opposite direction, pursuing rules intended to give token issuers clearer paths for fundraising and eventually allowing some tokens to shed the investment-contract framework through which they were originally sold.
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