Why Trump’s Crypto Advisor Is Optimistic on the CLARITY Act Passing

Despite the CLARITY Act missing its deadline for a vote ahead of the Senate's August recess, President Trump's highest advisor on crypto is still optimistic it can get passed.

In fact, he's more optimistic than ever.

“I would say I’m as bullish, as optimistic as I’ve been throughout,” Patrick Witt, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told Coinage at the SALT Wyoming Blockchain Symposium.

The next major test is now scheduled for September 15, when lawmakers are expected to take an initial vote that could determine whether CLARITY still has a path forward before the midterms. According to Witt, the delay in the vote may ultimately help.

“Nothing motivates like a deadline,” he said, pointing to previous bursts of progress ahead of committee markups and the push to get a procedural vote before the August recess. “The fact that we have the September vote now on the books, I’m confident that those… two to three weeks before that vote, there’s going to be a lot of breakthroughs that happen — or not.”

That may not sound like overwhelming confidence. But in Washington, getting a sprawling financial regulation bill down to a finite set of unresolved fights counts as progress.

According to Witt, CLARITY is now essentially down to four major issues: ethics provisions, stablecoin rewards and yield, provisions tied to the agriculture side of the bill, and the BRCA. Some of those fights, he said, have become increasingly binary — less about drafting an entirely new compromise and more about lawmakers choosing between two established positions.

That is one reason Witt believes a broader bargain may finally be within reach.

“We’ve really gotten down to a place where there’s just a handful of issues left,” he said. “It’s really down to like, it’s either this or that. So we’re kind of at a binary stage, and that’s usually when some kind of grand bargain can happen between senators on both sides of the aisle.”

The bigger challenge is that the fight over CLARITY has never been as simple as Republicans versus Democrats.

Witt described overlapping battle lines within crypto itself, between crypto companies and traditional financial institutions, among law enforcement groups, and even around prediction markets. Those competing interests have turned the bill into something closer to a negotiation over the future structure of American finance than a narrow piece of crypto legislation.

Still, the amount of political and industry capital already sunk into the effort may now be working in CLARITY’s favor.

“Everyone has invested so much,” Witt said. “The industry has invested so much time, money, you name it, that I feel like people are kind of viewing this as like, okay, we put too much into this to walk away without a result.”

One of the most politically difficult issues remains ethics.

Democrats have continued to raise concerns about President Donald Trump’s ties to crypto businesses, while Witt argues the administration has already made a major concession. He said Trump agreed to an ethics provision that would prohibit federal officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets.

“The president ultimately made the decision that this bill and getting this across the finish line is important enough that he was willing to submit to a strong ethics provision,” Witt said.

He called that move “historic” and “unprecedented,” and argued that Democrats have since shifted the dispute toward how such a restriction should be enforced.

“That’s what the Democrats had said that they wanted this entire time,” Witt said. “And now it’s kind of shifted the goalposts a little bit.” For Witt, however, the stakes extend far beyond any one fight over Trump, stablecoin rewards, or regulatory jurisdiction.

He said foreign regulators and government officials are actively watching what happens in Washington, with many expecting to use the eventual U.S. framework as a reference point for their own rules.

“They’re always saying, we’re just waiting for the U.S. to pass CLARITY and establish their market structure framework,” Witt said. “And then we’re basically going to build off of that.”

In his view, that puts something larger than crypto policy on the line.

“The world is absolutely waiting on the U.S. to lead,” Witt said. “And I think failure to do so would be a failure of American leadership and would have real consequences.”

That urgency also helps explain why the White House is not betting everything on Congress.

Witt said regulators have deliberately given lawmakers room to finish the legislative process, but made clear that federal agencies have significant authority to move on their own if CLARITY ultimately fails.

“The agencies still have tremendous authority and powers available to them,” he said. “They’re kind of teed up. They’re there, locked and loaded, ready to go.”

Witt said regulators are preparing a wave of rulemakings for the fall regardless of whether CLARITY passes. If Congress succeeds, those rules can be adjusted to fit the new law. If not, agencies can proceed using the authority they already have.

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