Senate's CLARITY Act Odds Hit 48% as Devs Beg Lawmakers: Please Don't Regulate Our Code 🧵

The CLARITY Act's chances of Senate approval in 2026 slipped to 48% on Polymarket on Wednesday, down from 55%, as ethics negotiations between lawmakers turned "rocky" ahead of a White House meeting on the crypto market structure bill. The decline coincided with law enforcement objections and a shift in the Senate Banking Committee's attention toward AI legislation, according to reporting by journalist Eleanor Terrett, who cited a Democratic source familiar with a bipartisan Senate meeting. The source described what they characterized as an "about-face" by GOP members and the White House on an agreement reached before the Senate Banking Committee markup last month, including a provision that would have allowed state attorneys general to sue the DOJ over failures to enforce certain laws.

The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15–9 in May 2026, with two Democrats joining Republicans, and has since been placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar with a possible floor vote expected later this summer. Solana Institute CEO Kristin Smith said in a thread on X that the bill "has a real shot at passing the Senate" but only if protections for open-source developers survive the process. She warned that getting it "wrong risks pushing them – and the future of this technology – offshore." More than 60 crypto CEOs and founders signed an open letter backing the developer protections, including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Coinbase, a16z crypto, Uniswap, Kraken, Paradigm, and Ledger.

Smith's core argument is that open-source developers, validators, and non-custodial wallet providers do not custody user funds, do not execute transactions on users' behalf, and exercise no control over how their published code is used. Treating them as brokers, custodians, or money transmitters under 18 U.S.C. § 1960 would, in her view, impose financial intermediary obligations on actors who are publishing software and maintaining infrastructure rather than handling assets. She pointed to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), introduced in January by Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden, which would provide legal certainty for noncontrolling software developers and blockchain infrastructure providers that do not custody customer assets or control transactions and would prevent open-source developers from being classified as money transmitters solely for publishing code.

Smith's comments echo recent remarks by US Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce, who said at the IC3 Blockchain Camp at Princeton University that "many blockchain projects involve publishing open-source software, which is generally a protected activity under the First Amendment." The SEC's approach to digital assets has shifted under Chair Paul Atkins, who has pledged to end the agency's "regulation through enforcement" strategy toward the industry. As the Senate weighs ethics language and awaits the outcome of the White House meeting, developers and the more than 60 signatories are pressing lawmakers to keep the bill's open-source protections intact in any final version.