Crypto's biggest remaining legislative prize in Washington just got a more cautious price tag. Galaxy Research, the analysis arm of crypto firm Galaxy Digital, has trimmed its estimate of the odds that the CLARITY Act passes the US Senate in 2026 to roughly 50%, Cointelegraph reported — down from about 60% three weeks earlier and 75% in May. The reason, Galaxy's head of research Alex Thorn argued, is "a calendar story more than a substance story."

What the CLARITY Act would do

The CLARITY Act (the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act) is the US crypto industry's long-sought "market-structure" bill — the rulebook for how digital assets are classified and policed. It would sort tokens into categories and, crucially, divide oversight between two regulators: the CFTC (the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) would supervise tokens deemed "digital commodities," while the SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission) would handle those treated as investment contracts, or securities. Exchanges would register with the CFTC. The goal is to end years of legal limbo over the basic question of who regulates what in crypto.

It is separate from the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law that cleared the Senate in 2025. Where GENIUS set narrow rules for dollar-pegged tokens, CLARITY is the broader, harder prize — and it has more ground to cover. The bill passed the House last year and cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 on May 14, per CoinDesk, but it has not reached a floor vote.

Why the odds slipped

Galaxy's downgrade is about time, not votes. The Senate has only a few working weeks before its August recess and the midterm-campaign season, and a long queue of must-pass legislation is competing for floor time. The CLARITY Act could itself eat up the better part of a week of debate. On top of that, the bill still has unfinished business: the Senate Banking and Agriculture committees have not merged their versions into a single text — a prerequisite for a vote — and disputes remain over conflict-of-interest and consumer-protection provisions.

Markets are even more doubtful than Galaxy: on the prediction platform Polymarket, traders have put the odds of 2026 passage closer to 41%, Bitcoin.com noted. Galaxy signaled the odds could climb back toward 60% or higher if Senate leadership actually schedules floor time.

Why it matters

For the crypto industry, the stakes are concrete. After years of regulation-by-enforcement — with the SEC suing firms over whether their tokens were unregistered securities — companies want statutory clarity so they know which rules apply before they build. Every month of delay prolongs that uncertainty and, the industry argues, hands an edge to jurisdictions that already have clear regimes: the EU's MiCA rules, which Boursel has covered, took full effect and gave European firms a defined framework while their US rivals waited.

The bottom line is measured: this is one analyst's probability estimate, not a verdict, and legislative odds can swing quickly on a single scheduling decision. But Galaxy's downgrade captures a real frustration in the industry — that after the stablecoin win, the bigger rewrite of America's crypto rules is still hostage to the Senate's clock.