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Ahmed Barakat
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Galaxy Digital’s head of firmwide research Alex Thorn raised his probability estimate for the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 75%, up sharply from the 50/50 call he held as recently as April.
The trigger was a 15-9 Senate Banking Committee vote on May 14 that produced the first meaningful bipartisan signal the bill has seen.
Two Democrats crossing the aisle does not guarantee passage. But it moved Thorn’s model by 25 percentage points, and that gap is the story.
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How the CLARITY Act Gets to a Signature, and Why 75% Is Not 100%
The mechanism here is worth understanding precisely. The CLARITY Act still requires 60 Senate floor votes to clear a filibuster, followed by House reconciliation and a presidential signature.
Thorn’s updated timeline, published in Galaxy Research’s weekly brief on May 16, runs as follows: Senate Banking and Agriculture committee reconciliation in early June, Senate floor consideration by mid-June, final Senate passage before the end of June, House reconciliation through July, and a potential Trump signature the week of August 3.
The White House is pushing a more aggressive July 4 target. Congress has roughly nine weeks of Senate floor time before the August 10 recess, after which substantive legislation rarely advances in a midterm cycle. That nine-week window is the entire margin.
What changed in Thorn’s model was not just the vote count, it was the character of the votes. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joined all 13 committee Republicans to advance the bill.
The Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin yield compromise, which resolved a structural dispute over whether stablecoin holders could earn interest, removed the specific risk Thorn had flagged as most likely to kill bipartisan momentum. The bill reaching the Senate floor is no longer a theoretical outcome, it is the base case.
Not everyone is at 75%. Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, put passage probability at 60%. “In theory, we have everything we need,” Smith said. “A lot can go wrong.” Polymarket traders priced 2026 passage at 68% as of May 18, up from 46% at the start of the month but still below Thorn’s estimate.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s continued opposition on anti-money-laundering and ethics grounds remains unresolved on the floor, and the ethics language restricting senior officials’ digital asset holdings has created friction among some offices seeking carve-outs that could complicate the final vote count.
Thorn’s framing situates the stakes beyond the near term. He described the CLARITY Act and the companion GENIUS Act as the kind of foundational U.S. crypto legislation that has “laid the foundation for 100 years of US capital markets dominance.”
Andreessen Horowitz has drawn the same comparison to the Securities Act of 1933. Whether or not that framing holds, it reflects the legislative ambition behind the bill, and explains why a Senate committee vote is producing market-moving probability shifts.
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