The bill has not yet passed, but traditional brokerages have already gathered to enter the market.

Written by: 0x2333

On May 4, the White House expressed hope that Congress would send the Clarity Act to the President's desk before July 4. This cryptocurrency market structure bill passed the House in July 2025 with a vote of 294 to 134, but has been stuck in the Senate for nearly a year.

The Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Tim Scott, has locked the markup to be completed in May, aiming for a vote in the full Senate in June or July. Standing in the way are the Democratic lawmakers' requests to add an "ethics provision" that prohibits senior government officials from profiting personally from cryptocurrency assets during their tenure. The target of this provision is the President himself.

Two days later, on May 6, E*Trade, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, opened up spot trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana to 8.6 million retail investors, with a fee rate of 0.50%, currently the lowest retail crypto fee among mainstream Wall Street brokerages. The bill has yet to pass, but traditional financial giants have already made their move.

Whether Congress should wait for the bill, Wall Street has already given the answer.

Wall Street has already made its move

The bill has not yet passed, but traditional brokerages have focused on entering the market between April and May 2026, pushing retail fee rates down to a new floor.

The timeline is as follows. On February 22, 2018, Robinhood was the first to include cryptocurrency trading in retail online brokerages, launching with zero commissions (including spreads). That same year, Coinbase launched a retail app with retail fee rates of 0.99% to 2.99% plus a 0.5% spread. In 2022, Coinbase introduced Advanced Trade, reducing retail fee rates to 0.40% to 0.60%. In 2023, Fidelity Crypto was launched with a 1% fee. This was followed by a blank two years.

In early April 2026, Charles Schwab launched Schwab Crypto, gradually opening Bitcoin and Ethereum spot trading to retail investors, with a fee rate of 0.75%. A month later, on May 6, Morgan Stanley's E*Trade followed with a 0.50% fee rate, covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. According to BeInCrypto, this is the lowest retail crypto trading fee currently among traditional financial giants.

A comparison of the fee structures reveals the pressure. The most common retail fee on the standard Coinbase app is 0.99%-2.99% plus a 0.5% spread, equivalent to a total payment of 1.5%-3.5%. E*Trade's 0.5% brings this number down to a third. Fidelity's 1% has become the most expensive among its peers. Coinbase Advanced Trade remains competitive, but it is aimed at high-frequency and high-net-worth users, not the retail choice covering the average retail investor.

Why is there a concentrated opening in April-May 2026? There are two time anchors. One is the GENIUS Act, which is the stablecoin regulatory framework, already signed into law in July 2025, providing compliance clarity for traditional financial institutions managing and clearing stablecoins. The other is the Clarity Act, which is about to enter Senate markup; regardless of the final result, the outline of mainstream market structure has become clear, and traditional financial giants are no longer worried about being retroactively regulated after entering the market. Wall Street is making its decisions based on the probability distribution of "Clarity Act likely passing" rather than waiting for the bill's signature.

The "ethics provision" targets the President

The ethics provision requested by Democratic lawmakers has been repeatedly submitted to the White House since 2025 and has been repeatedly returned. The reason is not abstract. According to a January 2026 report by Bloomberg, about one-fifth of the Trump family's $6.8 billion wealth directly comes from cryptocurrency projects.

Breaking these projects down into more specific components reveals the details. The realized cash flow is approximately $1.47 billion, mainly from four products. The token sale of World Liberty Financial (WLFI) is the major component; by December 2025, the Trump family had cumulatively profited about $1 billion from this DeFi project, including $550 million raised through public offerings.

The $TRUMP memecoin launched three days before the inauguration in January 2025, bringing the family $362 million in fees and trading profits. Melania's $MELANIA memecoin followed closely, contributing about $65 million. The interest on the reserves of the USD1 stablecoin amounts to $42 million.

The unrealized holdings are valued at about $2.8 billion. WLFI still has $1.5 billion in unsold tokens on the balance sheet, but this portion is greatly influenced by WLFI price fluctuations. Trump's Bitcoin reserves in Trump Media are estimated by FinanceFeeds to be between 9,500 and 11,500 coins, worth about $840 million at current Bitcoin prices. The valuation of the USD1 business and equity in American Bitcoin mining and other businesses totals about $460 million.

Combining realized and unrealized amounts results in approximately $4.3 billion. This is the actual figure behind the ethics provision. The version promoted by lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren explicitly states "prohibiting current senior officials from profiting personally from cryptocurrency assets during their tenure," and a compromise version sent to the White House was again returned. Whether the bill should go to the Senate full vote with this provision essentially asks each senator: Are you willing to publicly cast a vote to slice off this $4.3 billion cake from the President's family.

Will the Clarity Act pass this year?

The Clarity Act forcibly categorizes all digital assets into three pools. The first pool is "digital commodities," regulated by the CFTC, corresponding to tokens operating on "mature blockchain systems." The bill has two hard standards for defining "mature": one is that the network has complete functionality and can reach consensus, and the second is that it is sufficiently decentralized, with no single entity able to unilaterally modify the protocol or governance.

The second pool is "investment contract assets," regulated by the SEC, corresponding to tokens representing equity, debt, or similar rights, such as tokenized stocks, traditional securities distributed on-chain, and RWA (real estate, notes, receivables). The third pool is payment stablecoins, primarily led by banking regulators, requiring capital, custody, and anti-manipulation standards to be met.

Compared to the FIT21 which died in the Senate in 2024, the Clarity Act has three upgrades. The classification of stablecoins has changed from "unspecified" to "allocated by trading venue," with stablecoin trading on CFTC platforms governed by the CFTC and on SEC platforms governed by the SEC, although the SEC retains only anti-fraud authority.

DeFi exemptions have shifted from principled safe harbors to enumerative specific activity exemptions, where actions like custody front-end, running nodes, and publishing code will not trigger registration obligations. Registration for exchanges has changed from "inter-agency coordination" to mandating dual registration for intermediaries handling digital commodities, even if that intermediary is already an SEC-licensed broker-dealer.

The logic of the bill is very clear: to write into law the greatest uncertainty in the cryptocurrency industry over the past few years, which is "who exactly regulates this thing."

The Clarity Act currently stands before few companions.

According to a public statement from Congressman French Hill's office, during the 116th Congress (2019-2020), over 40 cryptocurrency and blockchain-related bills were introduced. The final passage rate of these bills was zero. The 118th Congress (2023-2024) introduced FIT21, which passed the House in May 2024. This was the first cryptocurrency market structure bill to pass a full House vote, but it also died in the Senate.

On July 18, 2025, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, establishing a legal framework for payment stablecoins. This is the first and, to date, the only federally signed law related to cryptocurrency in six years. On the 17th of the same month, the House passed the Clarity Act with a vote of 294 to 134. Theoretically, the Clarity Act has arrived at the same position as FIT21 did during its time, having passed the House and waiting for a Senate vote.

The difference lies in the political environment. During the FIT21 period, the Democrats controlled the White House, and there was no top-level drive for cryptocurrency regulation; now, the Trump administration is publicly promoting it. However, the compromise version of the ethics provision has been rejected by the White House, and key Democratic lawmakers remain unconvinced. If the first week of August is missed, the Senate will be in recess until September 14. Considering the midterm elections on November 3, whether the bill can be signed within 2026 is no longer solely dependent on "whether the White House wants to."

Historically, out of over 50 bills in six years, only one has been signed into law. Whether the Clarity Act will be the second will be seen in the next two months.