Will The US CLARITY Vote Shield Corporate Crypto Users From Legal Risk?

For years, US businesses seeking to incorporate digital assets into their treasury operations, payment systems or customer-facing products have encountered the same recurring hurdle. The activity they wanted to pursue was plausibly legal, but the line between plausible and certain was patrolled by enforcement actions rather than clear rules. The result was a legal risk premium attached to anything involving digital assets that most corporate finance teams, product managers and compliance officers weren’t willing to pay.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is heading to a Senate floor vote. It’s designed to end that ambiguity by establishing a federal framework that defines which assets fall under SEC jurisdiction, which fall under CFTC jurisdiction and what the registration and compliance pathway looks like for intermediaries operating in each category. The goal is to replace “regulation by enforcement” with a defined rulebook that businesses can actually build against.

Whether the bill passes, and what it ends up looking like, is down to politics. A more useful focus for businesses is how their operations would change if it does pass and what the current legal grey area has actually cost them in terms of cancelled projects, sidelined capabilities and lost ground to competitors in regions with clearer rules.

The Real Price of Regulatory Limbo

The tangible impact of regulatory uncertainty is often overlooked because it manifests as opportunities ignored rather than direct challenges faced.

A treasury team deciding against digital asset settlement, a product manager shelving a crypto feature or a startup choosing not to build on a blockchain rail due to murky compliance – these failures are never seen. They’re invisible foregone opportunities, and they’ve been accumulating across the US business space for the better part of a decade.

This uncertainty has been particularly sharp in three operational areas. The first is treasury and corporate finance, where classifying a digital asset as a security or commodity dictates how it’s accounted for, how it must be held and the regulatory burdens that come with owning it. Payments and settlement, where stablecoin acceptance and on-chain settlement involve counterparty risk that’s hard to manage without knowing which regulatory regime applies to each side of the transaction. And customer-facing product development, where wallets, yield, rewards and embedded payments all sit in a category where a compliance decision made today could be invalidated by an enforcement action that reclassifies the underlying asset tomorrow.

Businesses operating in jurisdictions with clearer guidelines, the EU’s MiCA regime, the UK’s evolving crypto regulatory approach, have had a structural advantage in this environment. They’ve been able to build product roadmaps with defined compliance perimeters. US companies have largely had to build contingencies around regulatory uncertainty rather than against a stable rulebook – the CLARITY Act is an attempt to close that gap.

Whether it actually does depends on the specifics of what survives the Senate floor process. We asked operators and finance leads working at the intersection of digital assets and corporate operations to answer that question directly.

Our Experts

• Alex Witt, General Partner, Verda Ventures
• Jennie Levin, Chief Legal and Operations Officer, Algorand Foundation
• Nikita Khandheria, Founder and CEO, ERIA Hospitality
• Kyle Sonlin, Co-Founder, Global Settlement Network
• James Shaffer, Owner, Insurance Panda
• Dave Rodman, Founder and Managing Partner, Rodman Law Group
• Mahendra Balal, Enterprise Strategist, Sovereix
• Cristina Carata, PhD Candidate, Imperial College London
• Joe Sticco, Co-Founder and CEO, Cryptex

Alex Witt, General Partner, Verda Ventures

“Regulatory uncertainty shows up in the projects that never leave the memo stage. I’ve sat in the meetings where it happens: stablecoin acceptance scoped and priced, on-chain treasury modelled, settlement rails tested – then legal asks one question nobody can answer. Which regulator owns this? Nobody knows, so the answer defaults to no. Large corporations can’t ship against an enforcement mood.

“CLARITY’s real contribution is boring ‘clarity’, and that’s the point. The three-bucket split – digital commodities to the CFTC, investment contracts to the SEC, payment stablecoins under GENIUS – turns ‘is this legal?’ from a career risk into a compliance checklist. And statute sticks. Agency guidance flips with each administration, which is exactly why operators stopped trusting no-action letters. You don’t build a two-year roadmap on something a new SEC chair can delete in an afternoon.

“What the bill doesn’t settle is stablecoin yield. If corporates can’t earn on stablecoin balances, treasury adoption stays a payments story rather than a balance-sheet one.”

Jennie Levin, Chief Legal and Operations Officer, Algorand Foundation

“Algorand Foundation has lived both sides of this. For nearly three years, ALGO’s regulatory status in the United States was contested, and the uncertainty carried a real operating cost: every US-facing decision, from exchange listings to partnerships to ecosystem incentive programmes, needed a securities-law analysis with no reliable answer. Routine business slowed down or was shelved in legal review.

“In March 2026, a joint interpretation from the SEC and CFTC classified ALGO as a digital commodity, and that resolved the question for us. But an interpretation is agency guidance, and a future commission can rewrite it. That is what the CLARITY Act actually adds: it writes the framework into statute, giving the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over digital commodity spot markets while the SEC keeps investment contracts, with registration paths for exchanges, brokers and dealers. Statutory certainty survives a change of administration; guidance may not.

“What businesses need most from crypto regulation is durability, and the bill delivers it. What it doesn’t deliver is everything else: it’s a market-structure bill, not a tax or banking bill, and it’s currently sitting on the Senate calendar with no floor vote scheduled. Passing it before the window closes matters more than perfecting it.”

Nikita Khandheria, Founder and CEO, ERIA Hospitality

“We’re not a crypto-native business, but we’ve had conversations about accepting stablecoins and other digital payment methods, and the biggest reason we’ve held back hasn’t been technology – it’s been uncertainty. When you’re running a hospitality business, the last thing you want is to accept a payment today only to discover six months later that the reporting requirements, tax treatment, or compliance expectations have changed.

“For us, the question has never been: do we believe in crypto? It’s been: can we confidently build a process around it? If the CLARITY Act provides a consistent legal framework, I think many businesses like ours will finally be willing to experiment. That could mean accepting stablecoins from international clients, reducing payment friction for large event deposits or integrating digital assets into customer payment options.

“Legislation alone isn’t enough. Small businesses need practical guidance that translates legal language into operational checklists. Clear rules don’t guarantee adoption, but unclear rules almost guarantee hesitation.”

Kyle Sonlin, Co-Founder, Global Settlement Network

“For businesses seriously exploring digital assets, the hardest part has been making long-term decisions in a regulatory environment that still leaves too much open to interpretation. A company may see a clear opportunity in stablecoin payments, tokenised settlement or more efficient cross-border treasury movement, but it’s difficult to commit capital, secure banking and custody relationships, and bring a product through legal and compliance review when the rules remain uncertain.

“The CLARITY Act could give companies a more practical foundation to move forward compliantly, as clearer lines around oversight and responsibility would support investment in stablecoin-enabled payments, tokenised assets, custody and customer-facing products, while giving financial institutions greater confidence in how these services should be structured. It would also give founders and established companies more reason to build in the United States rather than look to markets with clearer regulatory paths.

“Important work remains around implementation, banking integration, tax, state-level obligations, custody and cross-border compliance. A durable federal framework would help keep innovation and investment in the US, while ensuring it develops with the safeguards businesses and customers expect.”

James Shaffer, Owner, Insurance Panda

“The actual costs of regulatory uncertainty aren’t the slowing down of new ideas – they’re the continuing costs of operating through older systems that don’t match the speed of the business. We run a high-volume digital acquisition operation, but because there’s been no clear framework around cryptocurrency, we pay vendors and affiliates through slow traditional banking channels. We operate at the speed a modern business requires, but through a dial-up banking system.

“We won’t allow stablecoin integration onto our balance sheet until we know that the operational cash flows we receive can be treated as defined liabilities under law. When regulators can neither affirm nor deny whether a company’s use of treasury assets is a digital commodity or an unregistered security, adoption becomes a catastrophic compliance risk rather than a competitive advantage.

“If the CLARITY Act passes, it gives businesses the authority to use compliant stablecoins as modular financial utilities rather than speculative instruments. What we need is explicit statutory protection for using decentralised ledgers as back-end operational infrastructure, separate from any reporting obligations designed for investment products.”

Dave Rodman, Founder and Managing Partner, Rodman Law Group

“My clients, with a few exceptions, generally aren’t paying much attention to the CLARITY Act because it doesn’t materially impact them. Most have already chosen to operate in a non-US-centric manner, as many companies have been doing since around 2018. I also think many are looking at the SEC’s current enforcement priorities and concluding that crypto enforcement isn’t at the top of the agency’s agenda right now.

“This reflects my view on the CLARITY Act since day one: it’s not as significant as people outside the day-to-day operations of crypto companies tend to think it is. There are definitely some nice-to-have provisions in it, but the US may have missed the window for it to matter in the way it does in traditional financial markets.

“There are some good provisions that protect builders, such as clarifying that non-custodial software developers – those who write code but don’t control user funds – aren’t money transmitters under federal law. I also think that if this passes, a lot of DeFi platforms that currently implement geofencing will be able to roll back those restrictions. The act doesn’t address the IRS, and it more or less leaves the SEC as the gatekeeper for token sales, so I don’t imagine it moves the needle much for token issuers.”

Mahendra Balal, Enterprise Strategist, Sovereix

“The primary barrier to digital asset integration hasn’t been technological capability – it’s been a lack of operational safe harbours. We’ve seen mid-market enterprises shelve plans for B2B stablecoin settlement rails because general counsels couldn’t definitively classify the risk profile or predict the accounting treatment. The threat of retroactive enforcement is a cost no sensible CFO will underwrite.

“If the CLARITY Act passes, it transitions digital assets from a compliance liability to standard corporate infrastructure. The immediate unlock is in cross-border treasury management, where businesses can finally use stablecoins to bypass T+2 settlement delays knowing exactly how to classify these assets on their balance sheet.

“What enterprises truly need – and what legislation often lacks – is granular clarity on real-time tax reporting for micro-transactions and definitive guidelines on custody liability when partnering with third-party wallets. Without addressing that administrative friction, operationalising digital assets will remain slow even if the overarching legal framework is approved.”

Cristina Carata, PhD Candidate, Imperial College London

“A useful way to look at the CLARITY Act is through the European experience with MiCA, which is already in force and has started to give companies a more predictable regulatory environment. The key point is that regulation doesn’t need to remove all risk in order to be useful. Its first practical role is to make risk manageable inside a business.

“Before MiCA, many European companies faced the same type of hesitation that US businesses still experience today – uncertainty around classification, the treatment of stablecoins. Even though MiCA hasn’t answered every question, it has created a common legal language. That is what the US market still lacks. If the CLARITY Act passes, its main value would be to make digital assets easier to assess and plan around.”

Joe Sticco, Co-Founder and CEO, Cryptex

“Regulatory uncertainty hasn’t prevented interest in digital assets – it has delayed broader institutional adoption. Movement around the CLARITY Act, the GENIUS Act, stablecoin initiatives and the continued buildout of ETFs all suggest institutions are preparing for a more formal digital asset market structure.

“If the CLARITY Act passes, it would provide businesses with greater regulatory clarity and help create the framework institutions have been waiting for. Clearer rules won’t eliminate volatility, but they can expand the investable universe and accelerate the transition from speculation to portfolio construction. What businesses need most is certainty around the rules. Institutions aren’t waiting for crypto to get quiet – they’re waiting for the rules to get clearer.”

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