US CLARITY Act Nears Finalization as Mike Novogratz Predicts May Timeline

 

By Onkar Singh // May 2, 2026 @ 09:32 AM Make AlphaWire Logo preferred on Google News
US CLARITY Act Nears Finalization as Mike Novogratz Predicts May Timeline

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Points of Focus

  • Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz expects the CLARITY Act to move quickly (committee in early May, signing by June).
  • The Senate Banking Committee missing its markup deadline signals slowing momentum.
  • Industry lobbying, banking opposition, and political timelines could determine whether it passes or gets delayed for years. 

 

Galaxy Digital’s chief executive told SkyBridge Capital’s Anthony Scaramucci that the CLARITY bill is expected to hit committee in the first week of May and could reach Trump’s desk by June.

However, his own firm’s head of research estimates only a 50% chance of that timeline materializing. Meanwhile, the Senate Banking Committee missed its expected markup deadline last week, adding further uncertainty.

 

What Novogratz said and what set him off

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz went on the SkyBridge Capital podcast with founder Anthony Scaramucci on Friday and declared the CLARITY Act a done deal: “So this is going to get done. It will probably get done in May. I would say the first week of May is when it goes to the committee, and then, you know, soon after Trump will be signing this thing in June.” 

 

 

The comments came after a week the crypto industry had largely written off. The Senate Banking Committee, which was widely expected to announce a markup hearing before Friday, did not do so. Markup, the committee-level process of amending and voting on a bill before it advances to the full Senate floor, is the procedural step the CLARITY Act must clear before it can move to a Senate vote. 

The absence of that announcement rattled markets and lobbyists alike. Novogratz’s podcast appearance was a direct attempt to reframe the missed deadline as a delay rather than a collapse.

 

What the CLARITY Act actually does

The CLARITY Act is a market structure bill, not a stablecoin bill, a distinction that matters for understanding what it does and why it has taken this long. Its core function is to draw a legal boundary between digital assets that are securities, regulated by the SEC, and those that are commodities, regulated by the CFTC. That boundary has been litigated and debated through enforcement actions and court rulings for years without resolution. 

The bill passed the House in July 2025 with bipartisan support and has since been stalled in the Senate, primarily because of a dispute between banks and the crypto industry over stablecoin yield. 

Banks have argued that yield-bearing stablecoins threaten their deposit base by offering consumers an interest-bearing digital dollar with none of a bank’s regulatory overhead. The Senate Banking Committee has not found a way to reconcile those competing positions fast enough to meet the market’s expectations.

 

Alex Thorn’s 50% and the mid-May cliff

Novogratz’s own head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, Alex Thorn, published a detailed research report earlier in the week that was considerably less certain. Thorn put the current probability of the CLARITY Act passing in 2026 at 50%, citing the Senate’s failure to announce a markup date as a significant warning sign. His precise condition: if markup slips past mid-May, the odds of passage drop sharply. 

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The reason is mechanical. Memorial Day falls on May 25. After that date, senators increasingly pivot attention toward midterm election campaigning, and the legislative calendar compresses. Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio has framed the end of May as a hard deadline in internal discussions. 

Polymarket’s prediction market, where bettors price real-money contracts on legislative outcomes, was sitting at 46% odds of passage as of April 25, almost exactly in line with Thorn’s estimate and a number that reflects genuine uncertainty rather than optimism.

 

The industry coalition and Lummis’s warning

The crypto industry has not been passive about the delay. More than 120 companies, including Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, Circle, and venture firm a16z, signed a joint letter coordinated by the Crypto Council for Innovation and the Blockchain Association, demanding the Senate Banking Committee move the bill to markup immediately. 

 

 

The letter represents the largest coordinated industry lobbying push on a single piece of crypto legislation in US history. Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of the bill’s most vocal Senate champions, put the stakes plainly at an April 10 Banking Subcommittee hearing: “This is our last chance to pass the Clarity Act until at least 2030.” 

 

 

Her logic tracks the midterm calendar. If the bill does not pass before Memorial Day, it falls into a legislative dead zone ahead of November elections and would need to be reintroduced and repriced from scratch in a new Congress.

 

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago signal and what tokenization has to do with it

President Trump reiterated his support for the CLARITY Act at a private event at Mar-a-Lago, where he stated that banks should not be the ones determining the direction of crypto legislation, a pointed rebuke of the banking industry’s lobbying against stablecoin yield provisions that has been the primary drag on Senate progress. 

His backing gives the bill a degree of White House cover that was entirely absent under the Biden administration, when the SEC’s enforcement-first posture drove a significant number of crypto firms to relocate operations to Dubai, Singapore, and the UK. 

Novogratz argued on the Scaramucci podcast that the legislation’s real upside extends well beyond crypto. He said the bill would enable large private companies including SpaceX and Google to be tokenized and sold to global investors through regulated onchain structures, allowing the roughly five and a half billion people who currently lack access to US financial products to participate in the American economy through a smartphone wallet. 

Whether that vision survives the Senate markup process intact is a different question entirely.

 

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Onkar Singh

Onkar is a seasoned digital finance (DeFi) content creator with half a decade of experience in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. He has contributed to leading crypto media platforms, and collaborated with numerous DeFi projects worldwide. He blends his passion for technology and storytelling to deliver insightful content that bridges the gap between complex blockchain concepts and mainstream understanding.

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