The Bill That Changes Everything (Including My Fundraise)

This week, French Hill, the Arkansas congressman who wrote the CLARITY Act, stood live on Capitol Hill for Fox Business. The chyron read: “TRUMP TO SIGN CRYPTO MARKET BILL ‘VERY SOON.’” Bitcoin was at $89,890 in the ticker. That’s not a pundit speculating. That’s the bill’s own author, on national television, telling the market it’s done.

I’ve been raising a pre-Series A for Mintlayer for months. And I want to be honest about something: this bill is not abstract to me. The regulatory environment that the CLARITY Act creates is the exact environment I’ve been explaining to prospective investors doesn’t exist yet, but is coming. Every conversation I’ve had about institutional capital, about why smart money is still on the sidelines, about why this moment in blockchain infrastructure is different from 2021, has had this legislation sitting in the background like an unresolved chord. So yes, I have a stake in what happens here. I’m going to tell you what I actually think, not what sounds appropriately cautious.

What the Bill Does

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (H.R. 3633) passed the House in July 2025, 294 to 134. It does one thing above all else: it draws a jurisdictional line between the SEC and the CFTC. The SEC keeps oversight of “restricted digital assets,” meaning tokens that function like securities. The CFTC takes primary control of “digital commodities,” which covers Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most of what the crypto industry actually builds on. For years, the overlap between those two agencies has been the central source of legal exposure for every serious project operating in this space. Founders, exchanges, and institutional allocators have all been operating under the assumption that the rules could change retroactively. That assumption has cost this industry an enormous amount of capital and talent.

The bill also creates a provisional registration pathway. Exchanges and brokers get 180 days from enactment to register and operate under that provisional status while agencies finalize their rules. Non-custodial DeFi participants, developers, validators, that category of actor, get expanded safe harbor. And critically, a token issued under an investment contract can transition to digital-commodity status once the underlying network achieves sufficient decentralization. That last provision matters for every infrastructure project building toward that threshold right now. Including mine.

Why It’s Stalled (And Why That’s About to Change)

The Senate is where the CLARITY Act hit a wall, and the reason is narrow enough to be maddening. The GENIUS Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025 to regulate stablecoins, prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest to holders. But it says nothing about whether exchanges and platforms can offer yield or rewards tied to stablecoins they distribute. Banks see that silence as a loophole that would siphon deposits into crypto. Coinbase, which earns substantial revenue from its USDC partnership with Circle, sees any attempt to close it as an existential threat to their business model.

The fight got ugly in January. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said publicly that he’d rather see no bill than a bad bill. Treasury Secretary Bessent called industry holdouts “nihilists.” White House crypto council director Patrick Witt hosted a mediation session on February 10. Trump himself sat in.

Look, this is what legislative sausage-making looks like when the stakes are real. The fact that the president of the United States is personally mediating a fight between Coinbase and JPMorgan is not a sign of dysfunction. It’s a sign that both sides believe the outcome matters enough to fight over. By mid-February, Armstrong had shifted to cautious optimism, saying on Coinbase’s earnings call that he expected the bill to pass in the coming months. The Senate Agriculture Committee has already advanced its own version. The remaining work is reconciling that with the Senate Banking Committee draft, and the White House has made clear it wants that done now.

Bessent has said openly that the 2026 midterms create urgency. He’s right. If this doesn’t move by late spring, the legislative window closes until 2027 at the earliest.

What Institutional Capital Has Been Waiting For

Patrick Witt, the White House crypto policy adviser, put a number on it earlier this month: “There are trillions of dollars in institutional capital on the sidelines waiting to get into the cryptocurrency space. Regulation is the unlock.”

I believe him. Not because of the bullish framing, but because I’ve had the conversations. Family offices, asset managers, pension consultants. The objection is almost never “we don’t believe in the technology.” It’s “we can’t get comfortable with the compliance exposure.” You cannot build a position in an asset class where the regulatory treatment can shift based on which agency is in a more aggressive mood that year. That’s not risk management. That’s gambling with your fiduciary duty.

The CLARITY Act doesn’t make crypto safe. It makes it legible. There’s a difference. Legibility is what institutions need to begin the internal approval process, write the investment memo, get sign-off from legal. Once that process can start, the capital follows. Not immediately, but structurally, over the 12 to 24 months after enactment.

CFTC Chair Selig put it plainly in January: “Congress is now on the cusp of enacting the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would provide long-overdue regulatory clarity to an American industry that embodies the promise of the future.” That’s the chairman of the agency that stands to gain the most jurisdiction under this bill. Read it accordingly, but also read it as confirmation of direction.

What This Means for Projects Like Mintlayer

We build on the assumption that regulated, institutional-grade infrastructure is coming. The CLARITY Act accelerates that timeline and validates the thesis. When large allocators can finally participate under a clear legal framework, they won’t put capital into speculative tokens. They’ll look for infrastructure, custody solutions, settlement layers, protocols that serious financial participants can build on top of. That’s the space we’re in.

I’m not going to pretend this bill is the only thing standing between Mintlayer and a successful round. Fundraising is fundraising. But I will say this: the regulatory environment shapes the risk calculus for every investor I talk to. A signed CLARITY Act changes that conversation. Not because the bill mentions us or anything like that, but because it signals that the U.S. has decided to compete rather than restrict. That’s a different world to raise in.

The Part Nobody Talks About

The critics aren’t wrong. Consumer protection advocates have noted that the bill’s exemptions are wide, that insider trading rules under this framework are weaker than in traditional securities markets, and that crypto exchanges could simultaneously own affiliated venture funds and list their own portfolio companies without the prohibitions that govern stock exchanges. Those are real concerns. The bill bends toward existing crypto business models rather than forcing them to conform to securities-law standards.

Whether that’s a reasonable accommodation to the realities of a new asset class, or a regulatory giveaway dressed up as innovation policy, depends on what you think the purpose of financial regulation is. That argument will continue well past the signing ceremony.

What I’m more interested in is what gets built in the space that this law creates. The framework is imperfect. Every framework is. What matters is whether it’s stable enough to build on. If the rules hold for five years, the projects that survive will be the ones that earned their position. The ones that needed opacity to function probably won’t make it.

French Hill went on Fox Business at 7 AM to say the bill is coming. The bill’s critics will be there too, eventually. Both of those things can be true, and the market will price them accordingly.

Anna is the Co-Funder and COO of Mintlayer, and writes about institutional capital, digital assets, and the infrastructure of long-term wealth. They’re currently raising a pre-Series A round.