Anthony Scaramucci warned the news that the Clarity Act may not clear the Senate until 2029, citing bank lobbying and political gridlock as the primary kill mechanisms. With the current mechanism, institutional compliance teams cannot approve allocations to asset classes that lack statutory legal classification.
Fiduciaries operating under ERISA or similar mandates cannot benchmark to an unregulated asset class without triggering liability exposure. Without the Clarity Act establishing jurisdictional lines between the SEC and CFTC, layer-1 tokens – Solana, Avalanche, TON- remain in a legal classification limbo that keeps them off the approved-asset lists of most major allocators.
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A 2029 Timeline Is Not Just a Clarity Act Delay, It Is a Different Market Structure
Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, did not frame this as a temporary setback. He identified three specific political fractures that have made Senate passage structurally difficult: Trump’s pre-inauguration meme coin launches that alienated pro-crypto Democrats, the Greenland annexation threats that burned NATO ally goodwill, and an unannounced Iran military campaign accompanied by a $200 billion defense request that consumed Senate bandwidth entirely.
The result from above, in Scaramucci’s assessment, is that opposition to the President has calcified into opposition to any bill he could claim as a win, including Bitcoin regulation.
He stated the dynamic plainly:
“I don’t see anybody that is against the President that’s going to allow him to have a win in cryptocurrency policy right now.”
Historical comparisons make the delay look even more structurally entrenched. Dodd-Frank moved from crisis to signature in 14 months. The JOBS Act cleared in under 12. The Clarity Act has been in active legislative motion since 2023, passed the House in July 2025 with a 294-134 bipartisan vote, and still cannot get Senate traction.
The verdict is straightforward: without the Clarity Act, institutional adoption concentrates into Bitcoin, the one asset class that has already achieved de facto commodity status through ETF approval, while everything below it in the cap table stays frozen out of serious institutional portfolios.
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Regulation by Enforcement Creates a Volatility Floor That Even ETFs Can’t Absorb
The specific problem with prolonged regulation by enforcement is not that it stops capital from entering the market. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have already demonstrated that it does not. The problem is that it makes enforcement actions unpredictable, and unpredictable enforcement is structurally incompatible with institutional position sizing.
When the SEC moves against an exchange or a token issuer without a statutory framework defining what constitutes a security, the headline risk is unforeseeable. Institutions modeling risk cannot establish a regulatory floor, which means they cannot size positions with confidence, which means allocations stay smaller and more liquid than they would under a defined legal regime.
Arthur Hayes has argued separately that Bitcoin’s value proposition exists precisely outside the regulatory system. However, that framing does not help compliance officers at pension funds or sovereign wealth vehicles who need a legal classification, not a philosophical argument.
“I don’t see anybody that is against the President that’s going to allow him to have a win in cryptocurrency policy right now.” – Anthony Scaramucci, SkyBridge Capital, Solana Policy Summit
Scaramucci flagged “extended chop” as the likely price regime through the remainder of Trump’s term without passage, a ceiling defined not by Bitcoin’s fundamentals but by the absence of a regulatory floor beneath everything else. As long as enforcement remains the primary tool for market structure, the ETF inflow ceiling stays lower than the asset’s underlying cycle would otherwise support.
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