Crypto Industry Has Path Forward Even Without CLARITY Act, Says 250 Digital Asset CEO

The US crypto industry’s momentum won’t be derailed in the long term even if the much-anticipated CLARITY Act, aimed at bringing more regulatory clarity to the crypto industry, doesn’t make it through Congress, according to 250 Digital Asset Management CEO Chris Perkins. “If not, we’re going to be just fine,” Perkins said on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction podcast on Friday, emphasizing that the two major financial regulators are already building workable frameworks. Perkins pointed to ongoing efforts by US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins and Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig, following the agencies’ joint interpretation released in March on how federal securities laws apply to crypto assets. Being labeled a security was once a “death sentence” for crypto “These guys are creating policy and precedent every single day, and they are giving us the one thing we’ve needed for a very long time, that certainty, that stability, and ultimately, a taxonomy,” Perkins said. “In the past, being a security was a death sentence; there was nowhere to go with it, and it just didn’t reconcile…now it is awesome to be a security,” he said. During the Joe Biden administration, under former SEC chair Gary Gensler, crypto tokens classified as securities typically faced enforcement action, delistings from major platforms, and had no clear pathway for compliance in the US market. Chris Perkins spoke to Cointelegraph journalist Ciaran Lyons on Chain Reaction on Friday. While Perkins said he’s not worried about the industry’s long-term outlook if the CLARITY Act doesn’t pass, he added that if it does become law, it would make it much harder for future administrations to roll back the regulatory clarity. “What you’ve done is you’ve essentially enshrined policy for a very long time, as hard as it is to pass a law, it is even harder to unwind a law,” Perkins said. “There is a reason why we say it takes an act of Congress to do something,” he added. CLARITY Act hopes rise Many industry participants have raised expectations that the CLARITY Act could pass soon after the publication of new stablecoin yield provisions on Friday. “It’s time to get CLARITY done,” Coinbase chief legal officer Faryar Shirzad said in an X post on Friday, after US Senator Thom Tillis and US Senator Angela Alsobrooks published the final text aimed at settling the stablecoin yield dispute between the banking and crypto industries. US Senator Bernie Moreno recently said that he anticipates the CLARITY Act to “get done” by the end of May. On April 11, US Senator Cynthia Lummis said, “It’s now or never.”