On January 29, 2026, at 10:30 AM local time in the United States, corresponding to 8 PM this Thursday in the East Eight Time Zone, the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry will restart its review of the cryptocurrency market structure bill—CLARITY Act. This meeting, which was previously rescheduled, is seen as a key step in the U.S.'s first systematic and positive response to the issues of digital assets' commodity attributes and regulatory boundaries. Around the time of this announcement, Bitcoin rose approximately 1.25% to $88,770, Ethereum increased about 2% to $2,944, and SOL climbed roughly 1.75% to $125. Meanwhile, New York silver futures surged about 10% in a single day to $111.47/ounce, indicating a simultaneous increase in cross-asset risk appetite and inflation hedging demand. A growing contradiction is being amplified: on one side, the adoption rate of cryptocurrencies and institutional participation is continuously rising globally, while on the other side, the U.S. has long lacked a clear regulatory framework, forcing the market to pay an additional premium for uncertainty. The review of the CLARITY Act is not the end, but it may become the starting point for redefining the boundary between "commodities vs. securities." The fate of the entire ecosystem, from Bitcoin mining companies to centralized exchanges, from underlying infrastructure to DeFi protocols, may be rewritten as a result.
Senate Rescheduled Meeting: Passive Corrections in a Regulatory Vacuum
● Key Committee Role: The U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry has long been responsible for legislation related to commodities and derivatives markets, and has a natural linkage with the CFTC, which regulates futures and commodity derivatives. Therefore, this committee holds substantial discourse power on whether digital assets possess commodity attributes. Its leadership in reviewing the CLARITY Act is not just a procedural arrangement but also a symbolic action to include digital assets in discussions within the traditional commodity regulatory framework, indicating that the question of "whether it is a commodity" has risen from a technical debate to a legislative issue.
● Review Focus and Boundaries: The core topic of this round of meetings is the legal classification of digital assets as commodities or securities, and the corresponding clarification of the responsibilities of the SEC and CFTC at the market structure level. The CLARITY Act is viewed as an attempt to fill a piece of the "crypto puzzle" in the existing binary regulatory system, providing a predictable regulatory path for trading, clearing, custody, and service providers through clearer market structure definitions. However, it currently remains at the framework level, with specific terms not yet publicly detailed.
● Accumulated Contradictions of Enforcement Replacing Regulation: Over the past few years, the U.S. cryptocurrency market has long been in a state of "regulatory vacuum + ex-post enforcement," with many key issues—ranging from token issuance methods, secondary trading venues to yield-generating products—lacking pre-established rules, and can only be passively addressed through individual lawsuits and settlement cases by agencies like the SEC and CFTC. This enforcement-driven regulatory model has created high uncertainty among project parties, exchanges, and institutional investors, with compliance costs rising but failing to clarify boundaries, eventually evolving into institutional pressure demanding systematic corrections through legislation.
● Review Rather Than Voting Phase: It is important to emphasize that the meeting on January 29 is merely a review meeting rather than a voting session, and it is far from entering a legislative "sprint period." In the absence of a publicly finalized text and any formal procedural timeline, the outside world cannot reasonably deduce the probability and pace of the CLARITY Act's passage. This rescheduling and restart more signifies that the topic has been placed back on the agenda rather than providing a result. The market can only price in the signal of "discussion has begun," rather than a specific legislative path.
Price Movements Indicate: The Implications of Mild Upward Trends in Major Cryptocurrencies
● Detailed Data and Magnitude Comparison: Following the news of the rescheduled review, both the cryptocurrency and commodity markets warmed up simultaneously. Bitcoin's price rose approximately 1.25% to $88,770, showing a steady climb; Ethereum recorded an increase of about 2% to $2,944, demonstrating higher elasticity; SOL rose roughly 1.75% to $125, continuing its high Beta asset characteristics. Correspondingly, New York silver prices surged about 10% in a single day to $111.47/ounce, indicating that the market is not only chasing risk assets but also amplifying demand for hedging and protection against inflation and monetary policy uncertainty.
● Pricing Based on "Path" Rather Than "Conclusion": In terms of magnitude, the overall mild strengthening of major cryptocurrencies is difficult to interpret as a pre-bet on specific terms' outcomes; it resembles the market paying for the fact that "the regulatory path is starting to become discussable and predictable." During the previous long vacuum period, any public review involving legislation was seen as a turning point of uncertainty, and this time, the price performance is closer to a "slight discount recovery" rather than a frenzied revaluation.
● Ethereum's Sensitive Role: Ethereum's price increase is significantly higher than Bitcoin's, closely related to its sensitive position in the securities attribute controversy. Due to the long-standing legal and enforcement battles over whether it constitutes a security, ETH possesses higher elasticity under the expectation of regulatory clarity: once the framework is clearer, regardless of how it is ultimately classified, the market can at least digest the "undecided" regulatory discount, which is reflected in a relatively faster price recovery in the short term.
● Silver's Surge and Cross-Asset Preference: The approximately 10% surge in New York silver places this wave of sentiment within a larger asset spectrum: traditional precious metals, as hedging tools against inflation and currency devaluation, are being heavily pursued by capital, while high-volatility digital assets and some commodities serve as "risk premium carriers." The CLARITY review is just one piece of the puzzle; the broader context is that capital is re-pricing the relationship between regulation, inflation, and growth, with cross-asset rotation accelerating.
Who is Expecting New Rules: Opportunities for Bitcoin Miners and Infrastructure
● Commodity Attributes and Mining Companies' Benefit Expectations: Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer points out that Bitcoin mining companies and related infrastructure assets are expected to benefit from a clearer definition of commodity attributes. If the legislative level provides a more explicit "commodity-like" positioning for Bitcoin, the business attributes of mining companies will align more closely with traditional commodity production and computing power services, opening up space for benchmarking against traditional assets like energy and data centers.
● Valuation Reassessment Logic: Once Bitcoin is more firmly incorporated into the commodity regulatory framework, the output of mining companies, custody services, and financial instruments derived from computing power may be viewed as relatively "regulatable and valuatable" industry chain assets. Correspondingly, in the capital markets, related listed companies have the opportunity to escape the discount logic of "gray survival" and align with the valuation systems of infrastructure or technology growth stocks, providing persuasive arguments for institutional capital allocation.
● Positive Feedback of Compliance Infrastructure: Under a more stable regulatory framework, underlying financial infrastructures such as custody, clearing, and market-making will find it easier to access traditional institutional capital. Compliance licenses, clear capital requirements, and risk control standards will, on one hand, raise industry thresholds, squeezing out short-term arbitrage and non-compliant players, while on the other hand, reducing large institutions' entry concerns, providing "explainable investment stories" for long-term capital, forming a positive feedback loop of "the clearer the rules, the more institutions dare to allocate, the better the liquidity."
● Regulatory Competition and Dollar Pricing Advantage: In the regulatory competition with jurisdictions like Hong Kong and the EU, if the U.S. chooses to provide a relatively friendly institutional path for Bitcoin and its infrastructure, it is likely to consolidate the global dominant position priced in dollars. If Bitcoin mining companies, custody, and clearing institutions achieve compliance and scaling in the U.S., it will strengthen the dollar's pivotal role in global cryptocurrency pricing, settlement, and reserves, extending traditional financial hegemony into the new asset class.
Who Might Be Squeezed: Compliance Pressure on Exchanges and DeFi
● The Other Side of Track Differentiation: Continuing Mark Palmer's judgment, while Bitcoin and infrastructure are relatively benefiting, centralized exchanges and DeFi protocols are more likely to face pressure regarding securities attributes and compliance obligations. The reason is that both essentially involve functions such as "matching, issuance, and profit distribution," making them more susceptible to being included in the regulatory view of "similar to securities service providers," being required to assume responsibilities akin to traditional brokerages, trading platforms, or asset management institutions.
● Structural Characteristics and Securities Elements: From the perspective of asset on-chain and issuance methods, some tokens exhibit clear fundraising and expected return descriptions; from the trading matching model, centralized exchanges and some DeFi matching mechanisms play intermediary roles similar to traditional exchanges; in terms of profit distribution structure, governance token incentives, fee buybacks, and profit-sharing arrangements are also easily viewed by regulators as possessing investment contract characteristics. These structural elements combined make it more difficult for related platforms to "rely solely on technical neutrality" to evade securities regulation.
● Ju.com Incident and Cross-Border Tightening: The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission has listed Ju.com as a suspicious digital asset trading platform, citing unlicensed operations, highlighting that global regulatory agencies' tolerance for unlicensed and cross-border businesses is decreasing. For trading platforms targeting users across multiple jurisdictions, compliance gaps in a single region are increasingly likely to trigger coordinated regulatory responses from multiple locations, amplifying compliance pressure. If CLARITY strengthens domestic licensing and market structure requirements in the U.S., it will further raise the threshold.
● Kraken DeFi Earn's "Gray Experiment": Against this backdrop, Kraken has chosen to launch DeFi Earn services in the U.S., EU, and Canada, offering users an annualized return of up to approximately 8%, which is, to some extent, exploring a product path that can be migrated to future compliance frameworks within a regulatory "not yet fully defined" gray area. Leading platforms are attempting to package yield-generating products with more transparent terms and risk control models, hoping to build a "compliance template" ahead of the rules being implemented for a smooth transition under formal regulation in the future.
U.S. Legislation a Step Behind: Regulatory Premium and Global Rhythm Misalignment
● Composition of Risk Premium: The so-called "risk premium caused by regulatory uncertainty" is not an abstract concept but is concretely reflected in rising compliance costs, valuation discounts, and liquidity discounts. Project parties and service providers need to reserve more legal and risk control costs for unclear boundaries, while investors add "policy risk discount" to their valuation models, leading similar assets to be forced to trade at a discount in the U.S. market.
● How Costs Feed Back into Valuation: Long-term expenditures by project parties, exchanges, and mining companies on licenses, litigation, and compliance consulting are being factored into valuation frameworks in the form of cash flow depreciation and increased capital expenditures. Even if the business fundamentals are solid, as long as there is a tail risk of "potential enforcement at any time," equity and token prices often struggle to achieve valuation multiples that match revenue growth, which is how regulatory uncertainty is financialized.
● Comparison of Rhythm with Other Regions: In contrast, Hong Kong and the EU have clearer advancement rhythms in licensing systems and market structure rules—the former through a retail-oriented licensing framework and compliance list management, and the latter through top-down unified regulatory rules, providing the market with predictable paths. The U.S. appears more hesitant in this process: on one hand, it still relies on judicial and enforcement cases to draw lines, while on the other hand, the slow legislative process means that the market discourse power that could have been consolidated through "first-mover advantage" is gradually being eroded by other countries, with opportunity costs continuously accumulating.
● Discount and Global Pricing Disconnection: Mark Palmer warns that if the U.S. Congress does not pass the market structure bill this year, the U.S. cryptocurrency market will continue to bear the risk premium caused by regulatory uncertainty. This means that against the backdrop of increasingly clear rules in other jurisdictions, related assets listed in the U.S. may continue to be disconnected from global pricing, maintaining a "systemic discount" that is difficult to bridge in the short term, which not only affects project and corporate financing but may also reshape the geographical distribution of capital and innovation activities.
The Game Enters Deep Waters: How to Position in Uncertainty
The rescheduling of the CLARITY Act review itself is a signal: the regulatory authorities can no longer avoid the scale of the digital asset market and the pressure of global competition, and must shift from "case-by-case enforcement" to discussing systemic rules. Bitcoin and its upstream and downstream mining companies, custody, and computing power infrastructure are generally viewed by the market as relatively beneficial, while centralized exchanges and DeFi are more likely to be pushed into the spotlight of compliance pressure and securities regulation. However, there remains significant uncertainty regarding the specific outcomes, and any excessive expectations in a single direction may be corrected by facts. Short-term price fluctuations are more about trading on the "path becoming clearer" rather than pricing on the "result being determined." In the medium to long term, what is more worth tracking are the publicly available versions of the bill text, subsequent hearing arrangements, and subtle changes in enforcement guidelines from regulatory agencies. For investors, a more pragmatic approach at present is to moderately tilt towards directions with clearer commodity attributes and more rigid infrastructure in terms of track selection, avoid concentrated exposure in a single jurisdiction geographically, and view compliance and policy risks as one of the core variables in asset portfolio management, rather than attempting to predict when and in what form the CLARITY Act will pass.
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