Clarity Act's 77% Middlemen Focus Leaves Bitcoin (BTC) Unaddressed, Hermine Wong Argues

Bitcoin (BTC) and the wider crypto industry have spent years watching market-structure bills stall in Congress, and the current test case, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, has now been pushed to mid-September. That history of stalled proposals — from the Token Taxonomy Act to the DCCPA to FIT21 — made almost any comprehensive legislation look like progress, a new critique argues. Now the analysis asks whether the Clarity Act actually serves the technology or simply the intermediaries built around it. Berkeley Law lecturer Hermine Wong, whose review of the three drafts found that only 2–4% of the bill's language focuses on the underlying technology while 44–77% centers on exchanges, brokers, custodians and other middlemen, argues that the legislation is less an enabling framework for decentralized networks than a licensing regime for crypto's largest companies. The figures vary across the House-passed version, the Senate Agriculture Committee draft and the Senate Banking Committee draft, but the pattern is consistent. The framing that supporting crypto means supporting Clarity, she contends, conflates the industry's business models with the peer-to-peer system outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper. More than a decade after that whitepaper presented cryptography as a way to replace trusted third parties, the bill's authors appear to have taken the opposite path, according to the analysis. Regulating intermediaries, in this reading, is not the same as establishing a legal framework for the technology itself, and a bill that spends most of its ink on the Walmarts and CVSs of crypto would do little to define safety, security or governance standards for the underlying networks behind Bitcoin and altcoins. The critique does not dispute that intermediaries need rules of their own; it disputes the balance of the proposal.

The political backdrop gives the Clarity Act's structure a sharper edge. Crypto interests raised over $200 million during the 2024 election cycle, and a concentrated group of roughly 40 businesses and wealthy individuals supplied the funds, with Coinbase, a16z and Ripple accounting for more than 80%. Those contributions helped produce a Republican-controlled Congress and White House that has nonetheless failed to pass a market-structure bill, blowing through the July 4 and pre-recess deadlines its advocates once cited. The Senate has only scheduled a procedural vote on whether to consider the legislation, and the math in the chamber is widely seen as leaving that vote doomed; when lawmakers return in mid-September, they face 14–16 legislative days before the midterms and need to reconcile continuing resolutions to avoid a government shutdown. Crypto super PACs, including Fairshake, spent over $100 million to elect the current Congress, yet the analysis argues the industry's political committees have shown little appetite to hold Republicans accountable — Fairshake spent $0 on attack ads against Republican candidates in 2024 and directed its attack-ad spending at Democrats only. The upcoming procedural vote, in Wong's view, risks becoming a scorecard that helps steer the super PACs' more than $190 million war chest rather than a genuine effort to pass the bill. The largest crypto businesses have access to Washington, enormous lobbying operations and executives who have become political players, and they can survive without Clarity, the author notes. The underrepresented in the debate, she argues, are developers building decentralized protocols, people using self-custodied assets and making peer-to-peer transactions, and ordinary Americans who would benefit from technology that reduces middleman reliance rather than creating a new class of crypto intermediaries. Democrats, Wong argues, have spent too much of their response on ethics amendments aimed at Donald Trump, which are not a technology policy; an affirmative vision for the technology, she says, might appeal to young male voters who are disillusioned with both parties and disproportionately hold crypto, from Bitcoin to altcoins. That combination leaves the sector in a familiar pause: no federal market-structure law, no rules for decentralized protocols, and the same enforcement default that followed collapses such as Terraform's algorithmic stablecoin and Prime Trust, and hacks such as Bybit.

The analysis points to a primary source that is easy to check: the text of the House-passed Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (H.R. 3633) and the two Senate drafts. A close reading shows the operative sections are dominated by registration, disclosure and custody obligations for digital-asset intermediaries, while technology-specific provisions occupy a narrow slice of the bill. The measure is a proposal, not a final rule, so no effective date has attached and no entity is yet bound by it. If the procedural vote fails as expected, what carries over unchanged is the status quo: no comprehensive federal market-structure framework for Bitcoin (BTC) or the wider altcoin market, and the same fragmented enforcement-based oversight that has defined the industry since the Gensler era.