Andrew Cuomo pushes Congress to pass CLARITY Act as Senate stalls

Andrew Cuomo wants Congress to stop dragging its feet on crypto regulation. The former New York governor is publicly pressing lawmakers to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, known as the CLARITY Act, arguing that the US is falling behind other countries while senators argue over amendment language.

Cuomo’s push carries an obvious disclosure: he sits on the board of crypto exchange OKX. That context matters when evaluating the urgency of his argument, though the underlying legislative stalemate is very real.

Where the bill stands

The CLARITY Act, formally H.R. 3633, was introduced in May 2025 and cleared the House in July 2025. The Senate is a different story.

By July 2026, the Senate version had grown into a 616-page document. Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed a cloture motion on August 8, 2026, to try to force the chamber toward a vote.

The bill is stuck. Partisan disagreements over ethics provisions, specifically rules around government officials profiting from digital assets, have slowed Senate deliberations considerably. Prediction markets are not optimistic: Polymarket assigned the CLARITY Act only a 17% chance of becoming law in 2026 as of early August.

Cuomo’s framing is blunt. “You can’t have 50 separate states with separate rules,” he said, pointing to fragmented state-level regulations as a source of market confusion. His comments were partly triggered by New York’s lawsuit against prediction exchange Kalshi, which he cited as an example of the regulatory chaos that a federal framework would resolve.

What the CLARITY Act actually does

The bill’s core purpose is to draw clearer lines between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Right now, those jurisdictional boundaries are genuinely blurry, and that ambiguity has produced years of enforcement actions, legal disputes, and compliance headaches for crypto companies trying to figure out which regulator they answer to.

Beyond the SEC-CFTC question, the legislation targets a few other pressure points. Proponents argue it would lower the cost of intermediaries in digital asset transactions, expand financial access for people currently underserved by traditional banking, and provide institutional investors with the legal certainty they need before committing serious capital to the space.

The Senate math problem

A 17% probability on Polymarket is not zero, but it is not encouraging. The ethics provisions are the sticking point. There is a broader political debate about whether elected officials and their families should be allowed to hold or profit from digital assets while voting on legislation that directly affects those assets.

For Cuomo, the delay has a competitive cost that goes beyond any single company or exchange. His argument is structural: without a unified federal framework, US crypto markets will remain fragmented and unpredictable, pushing institutional capital toward jurisdictions with clearer rules.

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