The Senate drafted a bill that stops federal officials from issuing cryptocurrency. This includes the president. They called it the Clarity Act, which is what you name legislation when the first twelve drafts were called the Please Stop Act.
Someone in Congress watched a president nearly hawk gold sneakers and NFTs from the Oval Office and thought, we should probably write this down. Turns out the founders didn't anticipate a world where the commander-in-chief might launch BidenBucks or list the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on OpenSea. Constitutional oversight.
The bill imposes the first limits on federal officials sponsoring or issuing digital assets. Sponsoring is doing heavy lifting here. Does retweeting count? Does appearing in a Zoom call with Sam Bankman-Fried count? Does accepting campaign donations in Dogecoin count? The lawyers will figure it out around 2034, long after three more crypto winters have wiped out everyone who cared.
Retail traders spent six years begging for regulatory clarity. They wanted to know which coins were securities. They wanted to know if staking was legal. They wanted to know if they could write off their Shiba Inu losses. Congress heard all that and said, "Here's a law about whether the Secretary of Agriculture can launch a memecoin." Nailed it.
The bill doesn't ban federal officials from *buying* crypto. Just issuing it. So senators can still lose money on Solana like the rest of us. They just can't create the thing that loses the money. Small mercies.
This is the first time in American history that Congress preemptively banned something a president might do that wasn't a war crime.
Leave a Comment