The Stars Have Never Been More Aligned

Cast your mind back to two years ago. The SEC was suing crypto companies. The CFTC and SEC were fighting each other over who got to regulate Bitcoin. Banks were banned from holding digital assets. The idea of a pro-crypto White House felt like a distant fantasy.

Now look at where things actually stand.

The President signed an executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and has promised to make America the crypto capital of the world. The SEC chair endorsed the Clarity Act publicly and jointly confirmed with the CFTC that Bitcoin is a commodity, not a security. The CFTC chair signed a formal agreement with the SEC to harmonise crypto regulation. The Treasury Secretary posted on social media demanding the Senate Banking Committee pass the bill. The House already did its part — 294 votes to 134 in July 2025. And the main sticking point that held the Senate up for months, the stablecoin yield dispute, now has a compromise framework that’s broadly holding.

Every lever that needed to move has moved. This is the most favourable environment for Bitcoin legislation America has ever seen.

And the bill is still sitting on Tim Scott’s desk waiting for him to put a date in his diary.

What the Clarity Act Actually Does

We’ve covered the Clarity Act in detail in a previous piece, but here’s the short version of why it matters so much right now.

The March 17 joint SEC-CFTC interpretation already confirmed that Bitcoin is a commodity — not a security. That was a huge step. But it’s regulatory guidance. The next administration could reverse it. A hostile SEC chair could reinterpret it. It’s written in pencil.

The Clarity Act writes it in permanent marker. It makes Bitcoin’s commodity status federal law. No future regulator can undo it without Congress acting. That distinction matters enormously to the institutional money that’s now sitting on the sidelines wondering whether to commit.

But that’s just the start. Without the Clarity Act:

• Bitcoin payments remain dead in the water. Every time you spend Bitcoin it’s a taxable disposal, triggering capital gains reporting regardless of the amount. The technology to spend Bitcoin instantly and cheaply exists — Jack Dorsey’s Square is rolling it out to millions of merchants right now. The tax reporting burden is the wall. The Clarity Act creates the framework for a de minimis exemption that could finally fix this. Without it, there’s no route forward.

• Stablecoin yield stays in legal limbo. The GENIUS Act already banned stablecoin issuers from paying yield directly to holders. The unresolved question is whether third-party platforms — exchanges like Coinbase — can offer yield on stablecoins. That matters enormously. Yield is the incentive that makes people hold stablecoins rather than just use them to move money. Without yield, the digital petrodollar thesis weakens significantly. People in Turkey or Argentina will use dollar stablecoins to transact. But will they store their savings in something that pays nothing when alternatives exist? The Clarity Act is supposed to resolve this. Without it, the grey zone continues and the opportunity shrinks.

• Bitcoin’s legal status stays fragile. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF has over $50 billion in assets. Strategy just crossed 815,000 Bitcoin — adding 34,164 BTC in a single purchase on April 20 alone. The entire institutional infrastructure built around Bitcoin’s commodity status is technically built on regulatory guidance that could be challenged. The probability of reversal is low given the weight of money now behind it — but low isn’t zero. Only the Clarity Act makes it permanent.

The Clock

Here’s the brutal arithmetic of where things stand today.

The Senate returned from Easter recess on April 13. The Banking Committee has two working weeks left in April before the Senate calendar gets consumed by other business. Senator Moreno has said publicly that if the bill doesn’t reach the Senate floor by May, midterm election dynamics effectively kill it for 2026. Senator Lummis — the bill’s most committed champion — has gone further, warning the window may not reopen until 2030.

Tim Scott, the Banking Committee chairman, told Fox Business on April 14 that the markup may not happen in April at all. He named three remaining issues: stablecoin yield language, DeFi provisions, and securing all Republican votes on the committee. He said each could be resolved within two weeks. The industry took that as a May timeline at the earliest.

Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who predicted in February that he’d give 80-90% odds of passage by end of April, revised his forecast on April 13 to end of May — and described himself as “less optimistic than before.” Prediction market odds have fallen from 82% to around 61%.

What’s Still Being Fought Over

Tim Scott named three issues on Fox Business on April 14. Here’s what they actually are, in plain English.

1. Stablecoin yield. A compromise text exists — ban passive yield on stablecoin balances, allow activity-based rewards tied to payments and platform use. The banks can live with it. But Coinbase and Stripe told Senate staff they can’t accept the March 23 draft as written — it landed too close to the bank position. Lummis says it’s 99% resolved. The White House says the compromise is holding. It’s not fully done.

2. DeFi provisions. Decentralised finance — the world of lending, trading and earning yield through software protocols rather than companies — is a particular concern for Senate Democrats who worry it enables money laundering. The bill tries to draw a line: if you control people’s funds, you’re regulated. If you’re just software that nobody controls, you’re not. Democrats aren’t fully satisfied with where that line is drawn. The Blockchain Association sent 21 executives to meet with 24 Senate offices specifically to argue the DeFi case — which tells you how much is still being contested.

3. Republican unity — and a side deal. The committee is 13-11 Republican. Scott can’t afford a single defection if Democrats vote as a block. Republicans are also negotiating to attach community bank deregulatory provisions to the Clarity Act in exchange for the House accepting a Senate housing package. Classic Washington horse-trading that has nothing to do with crypto but could delay or derail the vote entirely.

4. There’s also a fourth issue Scott didn’t name: Democrats want an ethics provision barring senior government officials from personally profiting from crypto assets while in office. Given that the President’s family has launched their own stablecoin — USD1 — and the Trump family’s broader crypto interests are well documented, this is pointed. It hasn’t been agreed.

There’s a rich irony here worth acknowledging. Politicians trading stocks while writing the rules that govern them has been an open scandal for years. Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades became a cultural moment — her portfolio’s uncanny ability to outperform the market while she sat on committees overseeing the very industries she was invested in raised questions that were never properly answered. The ethics problem in Washington isn’t crypto-specific. It’s a systemic one that crypto has simply made more visible. If the Clarity Act delivers an ethics provision that only covers digital assets, it will be better than nothing — but it will also be a reminder of how selectively accountability gets applied in American politics.

None of these issues are insurmountable. Scott himself said each could be resolved within two weeks. But could be and will be are different things in Washington — and the clock doesn’t care about the distinction.

Why Timing Is Everything

To understand why the 2030 warning isn’t pessimism, you need to understand how Washington’s calendar works.

The Senate has roughly six to eight weeks of usable legislative time before the summer recess. After that, midterm election campaigning dominates everything. Senators from competitive seats stop taking political risks. Complex legislation with multiple stakeholder disputes — exactly what the Clarity Act is — gets shelved.

Then November arrives. And here’s where it gets genuinely precarious. Midterm elections historically punish the incumbent party. Republicans currently control the House. If they lose it — and history suggests they might — the entire legislative picture flips. A new Democratic House majority that has been consistently hostile to crypto regulation takes the gavel. You’d have a pro-crypto White House and a Congress that doesn’t want to play ball. Nothing passes.

Even if Republicans hold the House, a new Congress means starting the Clarity Act from scratch. New committee assignments. New negotiations. New political dynamics. The bill that passed 294-134 in July 2025 doesn’t carry over — it has to be reintroduced and re-passed.

And in January 2027, Cynthia Lummis leaves the Senate. She has been the single most committed advocate for Bitcoin-specific legislation in Congress for years. The stature, the relationships, the willingness to go to the mat on technical provisions — that leaves with her.

The 2030 estimate isn’t a dramatic prediction. It’s what happens if you map the realistic political calendar: lose the House in November, new Congress in January, new negotiations, another election cycle in 2028, potentially new administration. The next window where a crypto-friendly White House, Senate majority, and House majority all align simultaneously could genuinely be that far away.

The Petrodollar Stakes

We’ve written about why Trump signed the GENIUS Act the way he did — as a strategic move to extend dollar dominance into the digital age. Dollar stablecoins as the new petrodollar. The dollar of the Internet.

The Clarity Act is the second half of that strategy. Without it, the stablecoin market has rules but no yield resolution, no clear framework for platforms, and a legal grey zone for the products trying to build on top of it. Stablecoins already have basic de minimis treatment from the GENIUS Act — but Bitcoin gets nothing. The incentive structure that makes people choose to hold dollar stablecoins over alternatives — particularly for savings rather than just transactions — never gets properly built. And the dollar of the Internet never reaches its potential.

Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, currently earns billions annually from the spread between the yield on its Treasury holdings and the zero it pays to holders. Without yield competition from regulated US issuers, that margin stays wide — which is good for Tether’s profits in the short term. But here’s the counterargument: if regulated competitors could offer yield, adoption would explode. A smaller percentage of a vastly larger market could easily generate more dollars in real profit than a large margin on today’s volume. Tether might be protecting its margin while missing the bigger opportunity. Meanwhile, without Clarity, the regulated US players — the ones who would build the dollar’s dominance story — can’t compete properly, and the unregulated offshore player keeps winning by default.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

The Clarity Act is not dead. The odds still favour passage eventually. But “eventually” and “2026” are increasingly different things.

What makes this genuinely maddening — and the reason the diary entry framing is so apt — is that the political alignment needed to pass this bill has never existed before and may not exist again for years. The substantive arguments have been resolved. The institutional support is overwhelming. The President wants it. The regulators want it. The industry wants it. Even some banks have quietly accepted the yield compromise.

All that’s needed is Tim Scott to put a date in his calendar for a committee vote.

Senator Lummis posted three words on X the day the Senate returned from recess. The word “Clarity” was capitalised. The double meaning was not subtle.

Whether it lands before May or slips into the midterm void is now the most consequential open question in American crypto policy. And the answer depends entirely on a scheduling decision that hasn’t been made yet.

I’ll be covering this as it develops. If the markup gets scheduled this week, that’s the unlock the market has been waiting for. If it doesn’t, the clock gets louder. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get the update the moment it breaks.

The Federal Reserve has two jobs. Keep inflation at 2%. Keep unemployment low.

Right now, doing one makes the other worse. That’s the whole problem. And until something breaks — the war, the inflation, the political pressure — Bitcoin stays trapped in the crossfire.

Here’s how we got here, why it matters, and what it likely means for Bitcoin short and long term.

First, Understand the Lever

Interest rates are the Fed’s main tool. Raise them, and borrowing gets expensive — people spend less, businesses invest less, inflation cools. Cut them, and money becomes cheap — people borrow more, spend more, the economy gets moving. Two recent examples show exactly what happens when the lever moves.

2020 — rates go to zero. COVID hit. The Fed slashed rates overnight. Borrowing became almost free. Money flooded into anything with upside. Bitcoin went from $5,000 in March 2020 to nearly $69,000 by late 2021. A 1,300% rise in eighteen months. Stocks hit record after record. Cheap money works — until it doesn’t.

2022 — rates go to 5.25%. All that cheap money fed into real-world inflation. Prices hit 9%. The Fed raised rates hard and fast. Mortgage rates doubled almost overnight. The housing market froze. Businesses pulled back. Crypto crashed 70%. Anyone with a variable rate loan felt it immediately. The medicine worked eventually but the side effects were brutal.

One lever with dramatic results in either direction. It’s straightforward enough when you’re dealing with one problem at a time.

…but 2026 is not one problem at a time, it’s everything at once.

The Trap

Going into 2026, the mood was cautiously optimistic. The Fed had already cut rates from 5.25% to 3.5% since late 2024. Inflation was cooling toward the 2% target. The consensus on Wall Street: more cuts coming, looser conditions, risk assets heading higher. Bitcoin hit $126,000 in October 2025 partly riding that wave of expectation.

Then on February 28, the US and Israel struck Iran.

Iran sits next to the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows every day. The moment war broke out, oil markets went haywire. The shifting outlook from the White House on the war’s progress doesn’t give markets any certainty either. Prices surged over 60%. Energy costs jumped 10.9% in March alone, with petrol up 21.2% in a single month. Inflation — which was almost back under control — roared back.

Wells Fargo economists put it plainly: the two-year trend of falling inflation was over. Their forecast: headline inflation peaking at 3.7% in Q2 2026, staying sticky in the 2.7–3.1% range for the rest of the year.

For the Fed, this was a nightmare. You can’t cut rates when inflation is rising. So the cuts everyone was counting on were gone. The Fed held rates at 3.5–3.75% at its March meeting. The minutes released April 8 made it worse: the number of officials willing to consider a rate hike this year had actually increased since January.

Three months ago, markets were pricing in cuts. Now the Fed is discussing going the other way.

The Impossible Position

Here’s the bind, spelled out plainly. The Fed needs to fight inflation. It also needs to protect a fragile economy. Those two things require the opposite tool.

Cut rates: inflation gets worse. Oil is already pushing prices up. Cheaper borrowing adds more fuel. The Fed loses credibility it spent years rebuilding after the 2021–22 spike. Not happening.

Raise rates: the economy takes a hit it can’t absorb. The housing market, already under pressure after years of elevated borrowing costs, freezes further. Unemployment rises. People feel it immediately.

Hold steady: that’s what they’re doing. But holding rates while a war drives up energy prices and erodes purchasing power is its own slow squeeze. The economy doesn’t crash, it just doesn’t breathe. Inflation keeps grinding while savings keep losing value. Nothing actually improves.

There is no clean option. The Fed’s March statement acknowledged it directly, noting that “the implications of developments in the Middle East for the US economy are uncertain.” That’s central bank language for: we’re not sure what to do, so we’re doing nothing and hoping something changes.

Then There’s the Political Circus

Jerome Powell’s term as Fed Chair expires May 15. His replacement — if Senate confirmation goes smoothly, which is not guaranteed — is Kevin Warsh.

When Trump announced Warsh on January 30, Bitcoin dropped 6% that day, then fell another 8% over the following ten days. Gold crashed 9% in its worst session since the early 1980s. Markets were spooked.

Why? Because Warsh’s track record is hawkish. During the 2008 financial crisis, he was raising inflation concerns while the global economy teetered on the edge of collapse. He opposed the Fed’s $600 billion bond-buying programme in 2010–11, arguing it would fuel inflation and asset bubbles. His instinct, historically, has been tighter money, higher real interest rates, less central bank intervention. Those are precisely the conditions that drain liquidity from risk assets like Bitcoin.

But there’s a twist most people missed. Warsh has invested in Bitwise, the firm behind a spot Bitcoin ETF. He called Bitcoin “the new gold” for younger investors in a 2021 interview. More recently he’s argued that the AI productivity boom gives the Fed room to cut rates without reigniting inflation — and some economists now predict he cuts by 1% in the second half of 2026 once he’s confirmed. J.P. Morgan’s chief US economist said outright: Trump didn’t pick Warsh to maintain the status quo.

Trump has been demanding rates at 1%. He attacked Powell relentlessly. The relationship deteriorated so badly the DOJ launched an investigation into Powell, which Powell called a “pretext” to pressure him into cutting rates. His advice to his successor, delivered publicly: “Stay out of elected politics.”

Warsh’s confirmation isn’t even certain. Senator Thom Tillis has said he’ll block all Fed nominations until the DOJ investigation into Powell is resolved. The Senate Banking Committee is 13–11 Republican, meaning a single defection kills the vote. If confirmation stalls past May 15, Powell stays on as acting chair — the first time that would have happened since the 1940s. Add this uncertainty to the war and you wonder why the markets are on edge.

The War Bill Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in mainstream coverage. When this war ends, the US government has to pay for it.

Governments don’t raise taxes to fund wars — not enough to cover the real cost. What actually happens: they borrow heavily, then the central bank quietly accommodates that debt while keeping rates low. The cost gets spread across the economy through currency debasement — your money buying a little less every year. It happened after Vietnam. After the Gulf War. After 9/11.

The Iran war is weeks old and the check hasn’t hit the table yet. When it does, the political pressure on the Fed to keep money cheap — to make the debt affordable to service — will be enormous. That pressure is already building. It’s a slow-moving force, but it’s moving.

And here’s the part that matters for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins. No government can print more of it to pay for a war. No central bank can debase it. The very mechanism that funds military spending — printing money — is the mechanism Bitcoin was designed to make obsolete.

What This All Means for Bitcoin

Short term: uncomfortable.

Inflation elevated. Rates on hold or possibly rising. New Fed chair unknown. War unresolved. In this environment investors favour cash and bonds — assets that actually pay a return while you wait. Bitcoin, which pays nothing just for holding it, loses that competition. Price stays under pressure until something shifts. The honest answer: nobody knows exactly when that shift comes. If the Bitcoin 4 year cycle is still in play we could still be going sideways until October.

There’s an irony worth noting here though. The same high-rate environment that pushes investors toward yield is also fuelling one of the most powerful Bitcoin buying machines ever created. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) issues a preferred stock product called STRC that pays investors an 11.5% annual dividend. In a world where cash actually yields something, that kind of return attracts serious capital. Investors buy STRC for the yield and Strategy takes every dollar raised to buy Bitcoin. In March 2026 alone, Strategy accumulated 46,233 BTC — while the entire global mining network produced just 16,200. One company absorbed nearly three times the world’s new Bitcoin supply in a single month with just one of their products, funded almost entirely by yield-hungry investors. The high-rate environment is hurting Bitcoin on one side of the ledger. On the other it’s creating an unlimited buy bid while quietly filling Strategy’s war chest.

Long term: the argument gets stronger, not weaker.

Everything causing Bitcoin short-term pain is accelerating the long-term case for it. War spending leads to money printing. Money printing leads to debasement. Debasement is the exact problem Bitcoin was built to solve.

The dollar’s share of global reserves has fallen from 73% in 2000 to around 57% today. Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace since World War II. The petrodollar system that guaranteed global dollar demand for fifty years is eroding. These are slow forces — but they’re moving in one direction.

When rates do eventually come down — and they will, the debt load requires it — the liquidity conditions that drove Bitcoin to $126,000 in October 2025 come back, probably stronger than before. The banking infrastructure is bigger, the regulatory framework is clearer and the institutional money is already positioned.

The one thing to watch: oil.

If the Iran conflict de-escalates, oil falls, inflation eases, the Fed gets room to move. That’s the unlock for everything. If the conflict drags on, the squeeze continues.

Nobody knows which way it goes. What we do know: the forces building the long-term case for Bitcoin are being accelerated, not undermined, by exactly this environment. The short term is uncomfortable. The long term hasn’t looked like this before.

Next week: the SEC and CFTC held their April 16 roundtable on the Clarity Act. Full breakdown of what happened and what it means for Bitcoin’s legal status in America. Make sure you’re subscribed.

Let’s be honest — if you’ve been watching Bitcoin lately, the price chart looks pretty rough.

Down around 23% from the start of the year. Down roughly 47% from its all-time high of around $126,000 back in October 2025. Meanwhile, all the news has seemed so positive. New laws. Clearer rules. Big institutions piling in. Everything pointing in the right direction.

So what’s going on?

Here’s the short answer: the good news is real — but the world got messy at exactly the wrong time. A war broke out, inflation got stubborn again, and the interest rate cuts everyone was counting on got pushed back into the unknown.

But underneath all that noise, some genuinely huge things are happening that most people aren’t paying attention to. Let’s get into it.

A War Nobody Saw Coming

At the end of February 2026, the US and Israel launched military strikes on Iran. Markets felt it immediately — and not in the way most people expected.

The obvious assumption when a war breaks out is that people panic-buy safety. Gold, silver, the classic “safe haven” assets. And sure enough, gold spiked briefly. So did silver.

Then they both absolutely fell off a cliff.

Gold dropped roughly 25% from its January high of around $5,600 an ounce, down to around $4,100. That’s its worst monthly performance since 2008. Silver was even more brutal — it fell roughly 50% from its peak. Silver’s worst month since 2011.

Bitcoin dropped too — but only around 23% from its January levels. Which, when you compare it to the “safe” assets, looks almost dignified.

So why didn’t gold and silver do what they’re supposed to do?

The Weird Economics of War and Inflation

Here’s the thing people miss. Wars are inflationary. When a conflict disrupts oil supply — and Iran sits right next to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil flows — energy prices spike hard. And when energy prices spike, everything else gets more expensive. Food. Transport. Manufacturing. That’s inflation.

When inflation rises, central banks keep interest rates high to try to cool it down. High rates make cash and bonds attractive because they’re actually paying decent returns. And that makes “non-yielding” assets like gold, silver, and Bitcoin less attractive by comparison — because they don’t pay you anything just for holding them.

But here’s the backstory that makes this even more frustrating for investors. Going into 2026, almost everyone expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates several times this year. That wasn’t a fringe view — it was the Wall Street consensus. Investors had already started repositioning. Moving out of cash. Moving into other assets. Bitcoin, gold, and stocks were all riding that wave of anticipation.

Then the Iran war hit and yanked the rug. Oil prices surged — up over 60% since the conflict began. Inflation, which was already proving hard to shake, got worse. Suddenly those expected rate cuts looked a lot less certain, and investors scrambled back into cash and bonds as fast as they’d left.

Rate cuts aren’t gone forever — they will come eventually, because they have to. The economy needs them. But the question of when is now completely open, and that uncertainty alone is enough to keep a lid on markets.

So the war that was supposed to drive people toward safety actually did the opposite. It made cash king again, at least for now.

And Then There’s the War Bill

Here’s a question that isn’t getting nearly enough attention: when this war ends, how does the US government pay for it?

History has a pretty consistent answer. Governments don’t raise taxes to fund wars — not enough to cover the real cost, anyway. What they actually do is borrow heavily and then, quietly, print money to cover the gap. You probably heard the term “quantitative easing” or QE during COVID, when the US printed trillions of dollars in a matter of months. Wars have been funded the same way going back generations.

When more money gets printed, each dollar in your pocket buys a little less. That’s called currency debasement, and it’s been happening slowly for decades. The difference is the scale keeps getting bigger.

This is exactly where Bitcoin’s core argument lives. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, written into its code from day one. No government, no central bank, no president can print more of it to fund a war or a stimulus package or anything else. It cannot be debased.

So here’s the strange irony of the current moment: the very things causing Bitcoin’s short-term pain — war, inflation, money printing — are the exact reasons Bitcoin was built in the first place. The short-term is messy. The long-term argument just got stronger.

Next week we’ll dig into the Federal Reserve’s impossible position right now — caught between stubborn inflation and enormous pressure to cut rates — and what it likely means for Bitcoin short and long term. Worth reading before the rest of the market figures it out.

Wait — Gold Fell More Than Bitcoin?

Yes. Take a moment with that.

Gold is the asset that has been the definition of “safe” for literally thousands of years. Central banks hold it. Governments hold it. Your grandparents probably told you to hold it. And in this conflict — against a backdrop of war and global uncertainty — it fell harder than Bitcoin.

Silver, same story. Down 50% from its peak while Bitcoin is down 23%.

Now, gold isn’t finished. Central banks are still buying it structurally, and long-term analysts still have high price targets for when the war dust settles. But the simple story of “gold safe, Bitcoin risky” just took a serious hit.

Bitcoin held up better than the traditional safe havens in a genuine geopolitical crisis. That’s not nothing.

Meanwhile, The Banks Are Quietly Moving In

While everyone’s focused on the price chart, something much bigger is happening in the background — and it’s moving fast.

According to research from River, a Bitcoin financial services firm, nearly 60% of the 25 largest banks in the United States are now either already offering Bitcoin products or actively building them. Let that sink in for a second.

Here’s what that actually looks like right now:

• Bank of America advisors can now proactively recommend Bitcoin ETFs to clients. The bank officially suggests a 1–4% Bitcoin allocation may be appropriate for some portfolios.

• JPMorgan Chase — America’s largest bank — has partnered with Coinbase so Chase customers can buy and hold Bitcoin directly through the app. Chase Ultimate Rewards points can now be converted into crypto.

• PNC Bank has launched spot Bitcoin trading for clients, powered by Coinbase infrastructure.

• Citibank is launching institutional Bitcoin custody services.

• Morgan Stanley filed for a Bitcoin Trust and is preparing to let its 15,000 brokers recommend spot Bitcoin ETFs.

• BNY Mellon — one of the oldest banks in America — launched a digital asset custody platform and is rolling out tokenised deposits.

Now here’s where it gets good. Because you need to understand how insane this shift actually is.

That’s not a gradual softening of views. That’s a complete reversal in under a decade — driven by client demand and a regulatory environment that finally gave banks permission to act. When the CEO of the world’s most powerful bank goes from “I’ll fire you for touching it” to “here’s how to buy some,” something fundamental has changed.

One Company Is Buying More Bitcoin Per Week Than The Entire World Mines

You’ve probably heard of MicroStrategy — the company that started buying Bitcoin in 2020 and never stopped. They’ve since rebranded as Strategy, and what they’re doing right now is on a completely different scale to anything before.

They currently hold over 762,000 Bitcoin. That’s more than 3.6% of every Bitcoin that will ever exist.

But it’s the how that’s the real story.

Strategy created a financial product called STRC — nicknamed Stretch — which is essentially a high-yield instrument paying investors an 11.5% annual dividend. Investors buy STRC. Strategy takes that money and buys Bitcoin. Simple as that.

In just one week — March 9 to 15 — Strategy purchased 22,337 Bitcoin, spending roughly $1.57 billion in seven days. The entire Bitcoin network mines around 6,750 coins per week. Strategy bought more than three times that amount in a single week, funded almost entirely through STRC.

They’ve publicly stated they want to hold one million Bitcoin by the end of 2026. That would require acquiring around 5,700 Bitcoin every single week for the rest of the year.

You don’t need to buy STRC or own Strategy shares for this to matter to you. When one company is consistently absorbing supply at that rate, week after week, it puts real structural pressure on how much Bitcoin is available in the market. The demand is real. The numbers are real.

So Why Is the Price Still Down?

Fair question. With all of this going on — banks piling in, institutions buying, regulations improving — why isn’t the price reflecting it?

Because in the short term, fear beats fundamentals. Every time.

When investors are scared, they sell everything and move to cash. It doesn’t matter how strong the underlying story is. The Fear and Greed Index for Bitcoin — a simple measure of how nervous or confident the market is feeling — recently hit its lowest level since the FTX collapse in 2022. Sixty consecutive days in “extreme fear” territory.

That kind of sentiment puts a lid on prices regardless of what’s happening beneath the surface.

But sentiment doesn’t stay in one place forever. When it shifts, it tends to shift fast.

The Bigger Picture

Step back from the day-to-day noise and here’s what you actually see:

• Bitcoin is down from its highs — but less than gold, and far less than silver.

• The regulatory environment in the US is the most favourable for Bitcoin it has ever been.

• Nearly 60% of America’s biggest banks are building Bitcoin products.

• The CEO of the largest bank in America once called it a fraud. His customers can now buy it through his app.

• One company is buying more Bitcoin every week than the entire network produces.

• Historically, April is one of Bitcoin’s strongest months — it’s closed higher nine out of thirteen Aprils since 2013.

None of that is a guarantee. Bitcoin is still volatile. The war is still ongoing. Nobody knows exactly when rate cuts arrive. Anyone telling you they know what happens next is guessing.

But “Bitcoin is down — something must be wrong” is not the right read on this moment. The right read is: Bitcoin is navigating one of the most complicated macro environments in years, holding up better than the assets that were supposed to be safe, while the most powerful financial institutions in the world quietly build the infrastructure to bring millions of new buyers in.

The chaos is real. So is the progress.

Imagine paying for your morning coffee with Bitcoin and then having to file a capital gains report with the IRS because of it.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the law right now.

Every time you spend Bitcoin on anything — a coffee, a taxi, a takeaway — it counts as a disposal of property under US tax law. You have to calculate how much you paid for that Bitcoin, what it’s worth today, and report the difference as a capital gain. Even if the gain is a few cents.

It’s absurd. And it’s the single biggest reason Bitcoin hasn’t become a mainstream payment method despite the technology being more than ready for it.

The fix has a name: the De Minimis exemption. And it’s been agonisingly close to passing for years. But a new development in Congress has just thrown a spanner in the works — and if you hold Bitcoin, you need to know about it.

First, Let’s Understand the Problem Properly

Bitcoin is treated as property under US tax law. Not as currency. Property.

That means every single time you spend it, you’ve technically “sold” a piece of property. And selling property triggers capital gains tax on any increase in value since you bought it.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Say you bought one Bitcoin when it was worth $10,000. It’s now worth $100,000. You want to spend $10 at Pret a Manger.

That $10 of Bitcoin originally cost you $1. So you just realised a $9 taxable capital gain. On a sandwich. You now need to record the date, the amount spent, your cost basis, the current price, and the gain. For a sandwich.

Multiply that across every coffee, every grocery run, every small purchase, and you can see why almost nobody actually spends Bitcoin at the till — even when merchants accept it. The accounting burden alone makes it impractical.

This isn’t Bitcoin being broken. The technology works fine. The Lightning Network — a payment layer built on top of Bitcoin — can process transactions instantly for fractions of a penny. Square, co-founded by Jack Dorsey, has been rolling out Lightning support to millions of merchants.

What a De Minimis Exemption Would Actually Do

De Minimis is Latin for “concerning minimal things.” In practice, it means: small transactions don’t count.

Congress already uses this logic elsewhere. If you travel abroad and make a small profit on foreign currency conversion — say the pound goes up slightly while you’re in London — you don’t have to report that as a capital gain. There’s a $200 de minimis threshold for personal foreign currency transactions. It would be bureaucratic madness to track every holiday purchase.

Bitcoin deserves the same treatment. A De Minimis exemption would mean: spend Bitcoin on everyday purchases below a set threshold, no tax calculation required, no IRS reporting needed. Treat it like cash for small payments.

Senator Cynthia Lummis has been the loudest voice pushing for this. In July 2025, she introduced a standalone bill proposing a $300 per-transaction threshold with a $5,000 annual cap. Below $300 a time, up to $5,000 a year in total — no capital gains reporting required. The Joint Committee on Taxation reviewed it and found it would actually be revenue-positive, generating around $600 million over ten years, because more people would use Bitcoin and pay tax on larger transactions.

The White House backed it. Treasury Secretary Bessent personally offered to have his Office of Tax Policy work with Lummis’s team on guidance. Bipartisan support existed. It seemed like it might finally happen.

Then Congress did what Congress does.

The Twist: A New Bill That Fixes It for Stablecoins but Not Bitcoin

In late March 2026, a new draft bill appeared in the House. Called the Parity Act, it was introduced by Representatives Max Miller and Steven Horsford with a de minimis exemption baked in.

Sounds good. Here’s the catch.

The Parity Act’s de minimis exemption applies to stablecoins only. Not Bitcoin. Not any other cryptocurrency. Just dollar-pegged stablecoins like USDC and USDT.

Think about what that actually means. Stablecoins are pegged to the dollar. They don’t appreciate. If you hold USDC and spend it, there’s no capital gain to calculate anyway — it’s worth $1 today, it was worth $1 when you bought it. So what is the Parity Act actually doing? In practice, it’s removing the reporting requirement for a disposal that always results in a gain of zero. The IRS technically still requires you to log every crypto disposal even when the gain is nothing. The Parity Act means you no longer have to file that paperwork for stablecoin transactions — but the paperwork always said $0 anyway. The bill also includes a clause saying stablecoins that deviate within 1% of their $1 peg are treated as having no gain, closing a technical micro-loophole for the rare moments USDC trades at $0.998 or $1.002. Useful for large businesses processing thousands of stablecoin transactions. Barely noticeable for anyone else.

Meanwhile, nobody spending Bitcoin on a coffee has been worrying about $0 disposal forms. They’ve been worrying about the very real $9 gain on that sandwich — and the Parity Act does absolutely nothing about that.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute — the main advocacy group pushing for Bitcoin tax reform — put it bluntly: “Rather than promoting parity, this draft picks winners and losers.” Their former counsel called it a bill that “sets America and Bitcoin back.”

Pierre Rochard, board member at Bitcoin treasury company Strive, was equally direct: “The number one impediment to Bitcoin payments adoption is tax policy, not scaling technology.” And yet the bill that’s actually moving through Congress addresses everything except the actual problem.

Why Would Congress Do This?

Follow the money — and the lobbying.

Stablecoin issuers and the exchanges that benefit from stablecoin volume have significant lobbying power in Washington right now. The GENIUS Act just passed, legitimising the stablecoin market. There’s momentum around stablecoins as part of America’s dollar dominance strategy.

Bitcoin, by contrast, competes with nothing. No company profits when you spend Bitcoin on coffee. There’s no corporate lobby pushing hard for Bitcoin’s spending use case in the way there is for stablecoin adoption.

The situation got messy enough that Jack Dorsey — a prominent Bitcoin advocate — publicly asked Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong to address allegations that Coinbase had lobbied against a Bitcoin de minimis exemption. Coinbase executives denied it. But the fact that the question was being asked publicly tells you something about the temperature in Bitcoin circles right now.

The UK Picture Isn’t Much Better

If you’re reading this from the UK, the problem is slightly different but the frustration is the same.

The UK gives you an annual Capital Gains Tax allowance of £3,000. Anything below that in total gains across the year is tax-free. But it’s a yearly limit, not a per-transaction one. You still need to track every Bitcoin spend throughout the year to know where you stand against that allowance. The record-keeping burden doesn’t disappear.

And unlike the US, there’s no serious legislative push underway for a UK de minimis exemption. The US at least has politicians actively fighting for it.

Meanwhile, countries like the UAE, El Salvador, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland have either zero crypto tax or highly favourable treatment for long-held assets. The competitive pressure on the US and UK to get this right is real.

The Clock Is Ticking

Here’s where things stand right now.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute has been working with 19 Congressional offices to build support for including Bitcoin in any de minimis exemption. They’ve identified a window between now and August 2026 to get something passed before midterm election pressures consume the Senate calendar entirely.

Senator Lummis — the bill’s most committed champion — leaves the Senate in January 2027. If nothing passes before she goes, the advocates warn the opportunity may not return for years.

The irony is that all the ingredients for a solution exist. There’s bipartisan support for the concept. The White House has backed it. The Joint Committee on Taxation confirmed it wouldn’t cost revenue. The technology to spend Bitcoin is ready. The only missing piece is a law that says: small Bitcoin purchases don’t need to be reported to the IRS.

That’s it. That’s all it takes to unlock Bitcoin as a genuine payment method for everyday life.

Why This Matters More Than It Seems

Most people think of Bitcoin as something you hold and hope goes up. And right now, that’s mostly how it’s used — as a store of value, a hedge, a long-term bet.

But Bitcoin’s design has always pointed toward something bigger: a global, permissionless money that anyone can use, anywhere, without a bank. The Lightning Network makes that technically feasible today. Jack Dorsey’s Square is already bringing it to millions of merchants.

Tax policy is the last major non-technical barrier. Fix that, and Bitcoin stops being something you hold in a wallet and starts being something you actually spend — at the coffee shop, the market, online. That shift changes how the world thinks about it.

The Parity Act getting traction without Bitcoin in it isn’t just a policy disappointment. It’s a signal of how the lobbying battle for crypto’s future is being fought — and who’s winning it right now.

The next few months will tell us whether Bitcoin gets treated like money, or whether it stays in a category of its own while stablecoins quietly take the payments lane.

What do you think? Is a De Minimis exemption enough, or should everyday Bitcoin spending be treated like cash? Let me know in the comments.

On July 18, 2025, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law. It was the first piece of crypto legislation in American history.

But if you think this was about protecting Bitcoin investors or tidying up financial regulations, you’re missing the bigger picture entirely.

Trump signed this bill because America has a problem. A slow, structural, decades-long problem that most people haven’t noticed yet. And stablecoins — boring, dollar-pegged digital tokens — might be the most important part of the solution.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The System That Made America Untouchable

For fifty years, the United States has had an extraordinary financial superpower that most people have never heard of. It’s called the petrodollar system.

Here’s how it worked. Back in the 1970s, America struck a deal with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis would price their oil in US dollars — and only US dollars. In return, America would provide military protection and security guarantees.

The effect of that deal rippled across the entire planet. Because oil powered everything — factories, ships, planes, heating, transport — every country on Earth needed oil. And to buy oil, they needed dollars. That meant every nation on the planet had to hold US dollars in reserve, just to keep their economies running.

The result? Permanent, structural global demand for the US dollar. America could run enormous deficits, borrow cheaply, and effectively export its inflation to the rest of the world. It was, as one analyst put it, the greatest financial arrangement in modern history.

And it’s been quietly falling apart.

The Cracks Nobody Wanted to Talk About

The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen from 73% in 2000 to around 57% today. That’s not a blip. That’s a structural shift playing out over two decades.

Saudi Arabia — the linchpin of the entire petrodollar arrangement — let its 50-year agreement with the United States quietly expire in 2024. It has since signed a strategic defence agreement with Pakistan and begun settling some oil trades in Chinese yuan. It hasn’t abandoned the dollar entirely, but it’s shopping for alternatives.

China has slashed its US Treasury holdings from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to around $682 billion by late 2025. Brazil doubled its gold reserves in 2025 while cutting dollar assets to a record low. Central banks globally have been buying gold at the fastest pace since World War II.

The renewable energy transition adds another layer. As solar, wind and electric vehicles erode oil’s monopoly on global energy, the very foundation of petrodollar demand weakens. The world is gradually needing less oil — which means it needs fewer dollars to buy that oil.

None of this means the dollar is about to collapse. It’s still the world’s dominant reserve currency by a wide margin. But the direction of travel is clear, and anyone paying attention in Washington has known it for years.

Trump saw it. And he had an answer.

The New Petrodollar

If oil created the demand for dollars in the 20th century, what creates that demand in the 21st?

Trump’s administration believes the answer is digital dollars. Stablecoins. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it explicit at the White House’s first-ever Digital Asset Summit in March 2025:

Trump himself told an audience of crypto leaders: stablecoins “will help expand the dominance of the US dollar.” His son Donald Jr. went further, calling them “the saviour of dollar hegemony.”

This isn’t rhetoric. There’s a clear mechanical logic behind it.

Today’s stablecoin market is worth over $315 billion. Around 99% of all stablecoins are dollar-denominated. And here’s the critical bit: every dollar-backed stablecoin in circulation must be backed by real US dollars or short-term US Treasury bonds. That means every time someone anywhere in the world holds a USDT or USDC, they are — indirectly — funding American government debt and holding dollar-denominated assets.

Stablecoin transaction volume in Q1 2026 exceeded $28 trillion. That’s more than Visa and Mastercard combined. And roughly 90% of USDT transactions happen outside the United States.

People in countries with weak or unstable currencies — Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, Pakistan — are already using dollar stablecoins as their savings account and spending money. No bank required. No exchange required. Just a phone and an internet connection. Standard Chartered estimates that by 2028, two thirds of all stablecoin activity will come from emerging markets.

That is the new petrodollar. Not tied to oil. Tied to the internet.

But There Was a Problem

Here’s the thing. Before the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin market was a regulatory grey zone. Anyone could create a stablecoin and claim it was backed by real dollars. Some were. Some weren’t.

The TerraUSD collapse in 2022 wiped out $40 billion in days when its peg broke. Billions of dollars worth of supposedly stable coins turned out to be backed by nothing more than confidence. People lost their savings.

If the US government was going to bet its dollar dominance strategy on stablecoins, it needed them to be trustworthy. It needed the world to know that a dollar stablecoin was genuinely backed by a real dollar. No exceptions.

That’s what the GENIUS Act does.

What the GENIUS Act Actually Says

In plain English, the law creates the first ever federal rulebook for who can issue stablecoins in America and what they have to prove.

• Every stablecoin must be backed 1-to-1. For every $1 of stablecoin in circulation, the issuer must hold $1 of real assets — actual dollars, insured bank deposits, or short-term US Treasury bills. No creative accounting. No fractional reserves.

• Only approved companies can issue them. You have to be a licensed, regulated entity. A bank subsidiary, a federally licensed issuer, or a state-regulated body that meets federal standards.

• Monthly transparency is mandatory. Issuers must publicly show exactly what’s in their reserves every month. Anyone can check.

• Strong anti-money laundering rules apply. The same requirements that banks follow.

• Stablecoins are their own legal category. Not securities. Not bank deposits. Not commodities. A clean new framework that removes years of legal uncertainty.

The law also drew one important line that banks lobbied hard for: stablecoin issuers cannot pay you interest directly. A stablecoin that offers you 10-12% yield when your bank account pays 0.07% would pull deposits out of the banking system overnight. The Act bans that at the issuer level. Whether third-party platforms can offer yield on top of compliant stablecoins is still being contested — expect more noise on that through 2026.

The Race America Doesn’t Want to Lose

There’s another dimension to this that the White House is acutely aware of: China.

While America was debating stablecoin regulation for years, China was building its own digital currency — the digital yuan, or e-CNY. By late 2025, the Chinese government reported 16.7 trillion yuan in cumulative digital yuan transactions. Beijing is also running cross-border payment projects designed to settle international trade without touching the US dollar or the SWIFT system.

Saudi Arabia is participating in a Chinese-led central bank digital currency project. The EU is pushing what ECB President Christine Lagarde called a “global euro moment.” Countries across the developing world are building payment systems specifically designed to reduce dollar dependency.

The GENIUS Act is America’s answer to all of it. Not a government-controlled digital dollar — Trump specifically opposed a central bank digital currency — but a private-sector, dollar-backed digital money system that can spread organically across the world because people actually want to use it.

The key difference: China’s digital yuan is controlled by the state. Dollar stablecoins are issued by private companies, usable by anyone, and spreading through genuine demand. In countries with collapsing local currencies, people are choosing dollar stablecoins voluntarily. That’s not coercion. That’s network effects.

Where Things Stand Right Now — April 2026

The GENIUS Act is law. The detailed rules that make it work in practice are being written right now.

In February 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued its proposed implementation rules. The Treasury followed in April 2026. Public comments on the OCC’s proposals close May 1, 2026. Regulators are targeting July 2026 to finalise everything, after which the Act fully kicks in 120 days later.

What that means practically: the first bank-issued stablecoins — backed by FDIC-supervised reserves — could appear by late 2026 or early 2027. That’s a very different market from today’s Tether and Circle duopoly.

USDC is already gaining ground on USDT. Its supply surged 220% since late 2023 to around $78 billion, driven by institutional use and the regulatory confidence that comes with Circle’s compliance-first approach. As the GENIUS Act framework takes full effect, that shift toward regulated, transparent issuers is likely to accelerate.

Why Does Any of This Matter for Bitcoin?

Safer, more trusted stablecoins make the whole ecosystem more stable. They’re the on-ramps and off-ramps to Bitcoin. When you buy Bitcoin on an exchange, you’re often using USDT or USDC to do it. When you take profits, you park them in stablecoins. The more trustworthy those rails are, the more confidently people can move in and out of Bitcoin.

But there’s a bigger point. The GENIUS Act normalises the idea that crypto can be regulated sensibly, without being destroyed. Every piece of legislation that passes cleanly builds the political and regulatory confidence for the next one. The Clarity Act — which covers Bitcoin’s legal status directly — is still working through the Senate. The GENIUS Act just showed it’s possible.

And perhaps most importantly: a world where digital money is normal, trusted, and globally used is a world where Bitcoin makes more sense to more people. The GENIUS Act is laying the foundation for that world.

Leave your thoughts in the comments — especially if you hold Bitcoin!

For years, the crypto industry has had one simple ask of the US government: just tell us the rules.

Not “trust us, we’ll regulate it eventually.” Not surprise lawsuits and enforcement actions designed to make examples. Actual, clear, written rules. The kind every other industry takes for granted.

The Bitcoin Clarity Act is America’s attempt to finally deliver that. It passed the House of Representatives in July 2025 with 294 votes to 134 — strong bipartisan support. And then it hit the Senate, where it’s been stuck ever since.

Right now, in April 2026, it’s at a genuine crossroads. The Senate Banking Committee is expected to hold a make-or-break vote between April 13 and 20. If that doesn’t happen, analysts say the bill could be dead until 2027.

So what is this bill, why does it keep getting blocked, and why should you care? Let’s get into it.

The Problem It’s Trying to Solve

To understand the Clarity Act, you need to understand one fight that’s been dragging on for years: the SEC vs the CFTC.

These are two different US government regulators. The SEC — Securities and Exchange Commission — watches over stocks, bonds, and investments. The CFTC — Commodity Futures Trading Commission — oversees commodities like gold, oil, and agricultural products.

Both of them looked at crypto and said: “that’s ours to regulate.”

The result was a decade of confusion, contradictory rulings, enforcement actions instead of clear guidance, and a legal environment so murky that serious institutional money stayed away rather than risk getting it wrong. Crypto companies didn’t know which regulator to register with, what rules applied to them, or whether their product would be legal tomorrow even if it was fine today.

That’s not a market. That’s a minefield.

The Key Distinction: Security vs Commodity

The whole debate comes down to one question: is a crypto asset a security or a commodity?

It sounds technical. It isn’t.

Bitcoin is the clearest possible example of a commodity. There’s no CEO. No headquarters. No promises from a team. Its value comes from its fixed supply, its network, and global demand. It’s digital gold.

The problem is that without a law saying so explicitly, the SEC could still argue it has jurisdiction. And it did, for years. That uncertainty has a real cost — it kept institutional investors cautious, slowed product development, and drove crypto businesses to friendlier jurisdictions overseas.

What the Clarity Act Actually Does

In plain English, the bill draws the lines that should have been drawn a decade ago.

• Bitcoin and most major cryptocurrencies get classified as digital commodities. Regulated by the CFTC. Lighter touch. Clear rules for exchanges, brokers, and custodians.

• The SEC keeps jurisdiction over digital securities. New crypto projects raising money from investors — where someone is making promises about returns — stay under SEC oversight. As they should.

• A clear path for new projects to decentralise. A token can start as a security when it’s early and founder-led, then graduate to commodity status once the project is genuinely decentralised. No more permanent legal limbo.

• Clear rules for exchanges and custodians. Firms that hold or trade crypto get a defined registration framework. No more guessing which regulator to call.

• DeFi gets protected. Developers building decentralised protocols who don’t control customer funds are carved out from registration requirements. A huge relief for builders who’ve been operating in legal grey zones.

• No government digital currency. The bill explicitly blocks the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency — a government-controlled digital dollar that could surveil every transaction. Controversial but popular in crypto circles.

The overall effect: companies know what rules apply to them. Institutions can enter the market confidently. Bitcoin’s status as a commodity becomes law, not just an assumption.

JPMorgan analysts have described passage as a “positive catalyst” for digital assets, predicting it could trigger an institutional inflow cycle comparable to — and potentially broader than — what followed the Bitcoin ETF approvals in January 2024.

So Why Is It Still Stuck?

Because four different groups all have different definitions of what “winning” looks like — and any one of them can block progress.

The crypto industry wants a federal framework that gives firms a workable path into US regulation without the SEC’s enforcement-heavy approach.

Banks and their allies are worried about stablecoins paying yield. We covered this in the GENIUS Act piece — if a stablecoin can pay you 10-12% while your bank account pays 0.07%, the banks have a problem. They’ve lobbied hard to ban any form of yield on stablecoins.

Senate Democrats want ethics rules that prevent government officials and their families from holding or profiting from crypto while writing the laws. Given that a sitting president’s family has launched their own stablecoin, that’s not an unreasonable concern and it’s proved surprisingly hard to resolve.

Structural critics worry the bill creates bespoke exemptions that weaken existing investor protections. Their argument has slowed the debate on legitimacy, because it touches a real nerve in Washington about crypto getting special treatment.

A compromise on stablecoin yield was reportedly reached in late March — platforms can offer activity-based rewards but not passive interest on balances. The market didn’t love it. Circle dropped 20% and Coinbase fell 10% on the news. But the deal may be enough to unlock the vote.

The Big News: A Partial Answer Already Arrived

While the Clarity Act has been stuck in the Senate, regulators have been doing something interesting. They’ve been acting as if it already passed.

On March 17, 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly issued a landmark interpretation — their first ever — clarifying how federal securities laws apply to crypto. In plain English: they confirmed that Bitcoin and most major cryptocurrencies are commodities, not securities. Mining, staking, and most airdrops are not securities transactions. And crucially, a token can transition from security to commodity status as it decentralises.

The two agencies called this a “bridge” while Congress works on the full law. What it really is: a signal that regulators have broadly accepted the same framework the Clarity Act is trying to codify. The bureaucratic fight is largely over. What’s left is the political fight.

That’s actually encouraging. It means the core question — is Bitcoin a commodity? — has already been answered. The Clarity Act passing would make that answer permanent law rather than regulatory guidance that a future administration could reverse.

The Clock Is Ticking

Here’s where things stand in April 2026, as clearly as I can put it.

The Senate Banking Committee is expected to hold its markup session between April 13 and 20. That’s the critical vote — the committee deciding whether to advance the bill.

If that happens, the bill still needs to be reconciled with a parallel version from the Senate Agriculture Committee, then pass a full Senate vote, then be reconciled with the House version before going to the President’s desk. That’s a lot of steps.

If the Banking Committee markup doesn’t happen by late April, the bill misses the window before the summer recess. After that, midterm election pressures dominate the Senate calendar. Senator Moreno put it starkly: if it doesn’t move by May, digital asset legislation may not move forward for years.

The prediction markets currently price the odds of the bill passing in 2026 at around 72%. Senator Lummis says negotiations are “99% resolved.” Ripple’s CEO puts passage odds at 80-90%.

None of that means it’s certain. Washington has a talent for finding new ways to stall things that seem inevitable.

Why This Matters for Bitcoin Specifically

If the Clarity Act passes, Bitcoin’s status as a digital commodity becomes permanent US law. That’s not just symbolic.

It opens the door to new Bitcoin financial products regulated through the CFTC — a lighter, more innovation-friendly framework than the SEC. It gives institutions the legal certainty they need to build products, hold Bitcoin on balance sheets, and offer it to clients without fear of regulatory reversal.

It also sends a signal to the rest of the world. America just passed the GENIUS Act for stablecoins. If it follows up with the Clarity Act for Bitcoin and digital commodities, the US is no longer just crypto-friendly in rhetoric. It’s crypto-friendly in statute.

And as we’ve seen with the GENIUS Act, the rest of the world does tend to follow what America does.

Leave your thoughts in the comments — especially if you hold Bitcoin!

(Updated April 6, 2026 — things change fast, so check official sites for the newest updates.)

Event Details

• Dates: April 27-29, 2026

• Location: The Venetian, 3355 South Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV

• Purpose: The conference aims to unite builders, thinkers, and believers in the Bitcoin community to explore the future of Bitcoin, focusing on innovation, financial freedom, and the adoption of sound money.

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