1. One Insider's Honest Odds
Prediction markets currently assign the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act a 65% probability of passing in 2026. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse set his public estimate at 80% as recently as February, projecting passage by the end of April. The crypto industry's official posture is one of cautious optimism, with trade associations noting bipartisan momentum and framing the question as when, not if.
Ron Hammond — head of policy at Wintermute, one of the world's largest crypto market makers, a former congressional staffer who has spent years lobbying on digital asset legislation, and one of the most closely sourced individuals in Washington's crypto policy community — put his number at 30%. In a conversation with CoinDesk ahead of his appearance at Consensus Miami next month, Hammond said the lower estimate reflects what he actually sees in the legislative machinery rather than what the industry wants to be true. "There are a lot of moving parts," he said. "These dates are moving. There's light at the end of the tunnel, but there are hurdles along the way."
The gap between the 65% prediction market consensus and Hammond's 30% is not a rounding error — it is a 35-percentage-point divergence that reflects the difference between external market pricing based on headline signals and internal knowledge of where the actual obstacles lie.
2. What the Clarity Act Would Do
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is the most consequential piece of crypto legislation currently moving through Congress. Its core function is to resolve the most fundamental and commercially damaging ambiguity in U.S. digital asset regulation: which assets are securities subject to SEC oversight, and which are commodities subject to CFTC oversight. That ambiguity — which has existed since the SEC began asserting jurisdiction over tokens in 2017 and has been litigated case by case rather than resolved legislatively — has created a compliance environment in which the answer to "is this token a security?" is determined by which federal agency decides to file an enforcement action rather than by a clear legal standard.
For institutional investors, the absence of a clear classification framework has been a primary obstacle to meaningful portfolio allocation. Asset managers, pension funds, and banks that operate under fiduciary duty requirements cannot invest in assets whose regulatory classification is uncertain without accepting legal and compliance exposure that their internal risk management frameworks do not permit. A Clarity Act that defines the SEC-CFTC jurisdiction boundary would remove that obstacle, potentially unlocking a substantial wave of institutional capital that has been waiting on the legislative outcome before deploying into digital assets.
Beyond classification, the bill addresses how digital assets can be traded, custodied, and otherwise regulated — including rules for decentralized exchanges, crypto lending platforms, and the specific financial products that can be offered to different categories of investors. It is, in short, the framework that the U.S. crypto industry has argued for years that it needs to operate with confidence rather than under continuous regulatory threat.
3. The Bank Opposition: The Stablecoin Yield Deadlock
Hammond's primary explanation for his 30% estimate is the unresolved opposition of the traditional banking sector, concentrated specifically around a single provision: whether stablecoin issuers can offer yield to holders. The banking industry has consistently and aggressively opposed any stablecoin framework that would allow non-bank stablecoin issuers to pay interest or yield on stablecoin holdings — an opposition rooted in a straightforward competitive concern.
If regulated stablecoins can offer yield, they become functionally competitive with bank deposits — a product category that banks depend on for low-cost funding. A stablecoin that holds short-term government securities and passes through the interest to holders is, from the consumer's perspective, essentially a money market fund or interest-bearing account that provides the same liquidity as cash. Banks have calculated that if stablecoin issuers are permitted to offer yield, capital will flow from bank deposits into stablecoins, reducing banks' funding base and competitive position in the consumer financial products market.
This concern has given rise to the most intractable negotiating point in the entire legislative process. Hammond described multiple failed attempts to reach a compromise. A "yield deal" floated approximately two weeks before the CoinDesk interview failed to satisfy either side, sending negotiators back to the drawing board. A new version was circulating at the time of the interview, but Hammond's assessment was blunt: "Even with broader macro pressures, it's hard to see how the banks get happy here." Multiple parties — Coinbase, the White House, the bill's legislative drafters — have attempted to broker a compromise, and at every turn the banks have declined to move.
4. The Political Arithmetic for Democrats
The bank opposition creates a specific and difficult political problem for Democratic lawmakers who have accepted campaign contributions from the crypto industry. Those Democrats are being asked to vote for legislation that the banking industry — which is a far more established and larger political contributor across the Democratic party's donor base — opposes.
Hammond framed the dilemma directly: "If you're a Democrat who took crypto money, where do you stand on this issue?" The question is not rhetorical. Democrats who have accepted crypto donations are on record as crypto-friendly, but voting for a bill that banks actively oppose means choosing the crypto industry over the banking industry on a question where both sides have invested political capital.
The conflict is further complicated by the ethics dimension that has become increasingly salient in Democratic messaging around the Clarity Act. Trump's direct financial interests in the crypto industry — through World Liberty Financial, the $TRUMP token, the family's stake in American Bitcoin mining, and other ventures — have given Democrats a coherent narrative that the administration is designing crypto regulation to benefit itself. Hammond noted that "the president's involvement and the family's involvement in the crypto industry, there has been a very mainstream narrative around the corruption of this administration, or perceived corruption tied to a lot of the crypto industry itself." For Democrats who might otherwise be persuadable on the merits, this narrative provides political cover to oppose the bill without being characterized as anti-innovation.
5. The DeFi and AML Problem
Beyond the bank yield dispute and the Democratic ethics concerns, Hammond identified unresolved tensions around decentralized finance and anti-money laundering compliance as a third category of obstacle. The Clarity Act as currently drafted must grapple with whether and how DeFi protocols — automated, permissionless, often pseudonymous trading and lending systems that operate without traditional intermediaries — should be treated under the regulatory framework it establishes.
The AML dimension is particularly sensitive given the FATF framework's requirements that virtual asset service providers implement know-your-customer and anti-money laundering controls. How a regulatory framework can impose those requirements on truly decentralized protocols — which have no controlling entity to be licensed or held responsible — is a question that the Clarity Act's drafters have not yet resolved to the satisfaction of regulators or of the DeFi community, which is concerned that overly broad AML requirements would make compliant DeFi operation practically impossible.
6. The April 20 Target and Why Timelines Keep Slipping
Hammond noted that some lawmakers were pushing for a Senate Banking Committee markup vote as early as April 20 — a target that he was careful to contextualize with the observation that "these dates are moving." The markup date has been signaled, postponed, and re-signaled multiple times over the preceding months. The Senate Banking Committee under Chair Tim Scott has been attempting to advance the bill, but only to the extent that the vote mathematics support passage: both Scott and Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman have indicated they will not bring the bill to a full Senate floor vote unless they are confident of reaching the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster.
The 60-vote threshold is the critical mathematical constraint. In a 100-member Senate, 60 votes requires meaningful bipartisan support — specifically, some Democratic votes in addition to the Republican majority. The bank opposition and ethics concerns that have been keeping Democratic votes uncertain are directly connected to the vote-count problem that is keeping the committee chairs from scheduling a floor vote.
7. The Memorial Day Cliff
Hammond's most specific timing concern was the Memorial Day deadline. If the legislative process does not produce a committee markup and floor scheduling commitment before the Memorial Day holiday at the end of May, the calendar becomes deeply problematic for 2026 passage. Summer recess reduces legislative working days substantially. After the summer, the 2026 midterm election campaigns will increasingly dominate congressional attention and floor time as members return to their states and districts.
In the U.S. legislative calendar, complex financial legislation that has not cleared committee by early summer typically does not pass in an election year unless there is extraordinary political pressure to move it. The Clarity Act is significant to the crypto industry, but it is not on the same political priority level as tax legislation or appropriations bills that must pass regardless of calendar constraints. If it misses the pre-Memorial Day window, the probability of 2026 passage — already at 30% in Hammond's assessment — falls substantially.
If the bill fails in 2026, Hammond noted the next realistic window is the first or second quarter of 2027. By then, the midterm elections will have potentially shifted the congressional balance — potentially in ways that are unfavorable to crypto legislation, including the possibility of Democrats with anti-crypto positions gaining committee leadership roles that would give them gate-keeping authority over the bill's path.
8. What the SEC and CFTC Are Doing in the Absence of Legislation
Hammond offered a nuanced read on the interim regulatory activity at the SEC and CFTC in the absence of legislative resolution. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has made statements suggesting most tokens are not securities — a position that Hammond described as a positive signal for the market. CFTC Chairman Selig has been aggressive in asserting the agency's exclusive jurisdiction over event contracts and commodity-based digital assets, as demonstrated in the Arizona-Kalshi preemption case.
These regulatory actions provide some incremental clarity and reduce the most egregious forms of enforcement-based uncertainty. But Hammond's caution about their durability was pointed: these are guidance documents and enforcement postures that a future administration can reverse at will. Without a statutory framework that definitively allocates jurisdiction and defines classification criteria, the crypto industry is perpetually one administrative transition away from a reversal of whatever favorable guidance the current regulators have issued. The Clarity Act is valuable precisely because it would create permanent, congressionally mandated rules that cannot be reversed by agency leadership changes.
9. Wintermute's Expanded U.S. Presence and What's at Stake
Hammond's assessment of the Clarity Act's prospects is informed by Wintermute's own strategic commitment to the U.S. market. The company has expanded its U.S. operations since the November 2024 election, establishing a New York office and actively hiring U.S.-based staff. That expansion reflects the firm's judgment that the current regulatory environment, while imperfect, is more favorable than the pre-election landscape and that the U.S. market offers significant growth opportunity for an institutional crypto market maker.
The Clarity Act's passage or failure matters directly to Wintermute's business because institutional clients who are potential counterparties for the firm's market-making services are precisely the category of participants who are waiting for legislative clarity before substantially expanding their digital asset activities. Banks, asset managers, and pension funds that want to trade digital assets at scale need a framework that tells them which assets they can hold, how those assets are classified, and under what regulatory conditions their trading desks can operate. The Clarity Act provides that framework; its absence keeps potential clients on the sidelines.
10. The Gap Between Industry Optimism and Reality
Hammond's 30% estimate, standing against the 65% prediction market consensus, serves as a useful corrective to the industry's tendency toward optimistic forward guidance on legislative matters. The gap reflects a structural dynamic in how the crypto industry communicates about regulatory prospects: companies and trade associations have incentives to project confidence and momentum because regulatory optimism supports asset prices and investor sentiment, while candid assessments of legislative difficulty can be commercially costly.
Hammond's willingness to put a 30% number on the record — well below the industry consensus and significantly below his own earlier estimates in different contexts — reflects the reality he observes in the legislative process rather than the reality the industry would prefer to project. The Clarity Act may well pass in 2026. The stablecoin yield dispute may resolve. Democratic concerns about Trump's financial conflicts may be managed. The committee markup may happen before Memorial Day. But each of those outcomes requires a breakthrough that has not yet occurred, and in Hammond's assessment, the probability that all the necessary breakthroughs happen in the available time window is 30% — not 65%.