Hermine Wong, a lecturer at Berkeley Law, says the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, or the Clarity Act, is not really designed to protect crypto technology itself. In a recent commentary, he argues that the bill is built to protect the businesses of exchanges, brokers, and custodians instead.
His bottom line is blunt: after the crypto industry spent more than $200 million in election contributions, what it got back was a bill for middlemen.
The bill is called “Clarity,” but Wong says its focus lies elsewhere
Wong writes that the crypto sector has spent years watching major legislation stall, with the Token Taxonomy Act, DCCPA, and FIT21 all getting sidelined. In that setting, almost any broad crypto bill can create the impression that policy is finally moving. He says the Clarity Act turns that hunger for progress into a political trap.
He traces the argument back to the Bitcoin white paper, which appeared during the 2008 financial crisis. The original idea, he says, was that trusted third parties may once have been necessary, but they were also points of failure. With cryptography and ubiquitous networks, peer-to-peer transactions were supposed to replace those weak points safely. That, in his telling, is the original spirit of crypto: removing intermediaries rather than entrenching them.
Yet when readers go through the Clarity Act, Wong says they are nudged toward accepting a different premise — that supporting crypto means supporting intermediaries. He argues that the bill is structured around exchanges, brokers, custodians, and other middle-layer actors.
To make the point, he uses a pharmaceutical analogy. If Congress introduced its first major drug law but spent little time on efficacy, testing, or safety standards, and instead devoted most of the text to how pharmacies sell medicine, it would be obvious who the law was really serving.
Wong says the political money came from a narrow set of industry players
According to Wong, the crypto industry raised more than $200 million during the 2024 election cycle. Crypto-linked super PACs became the largest corporate-scale PACs and used large donations to influence multiple races.
He points to two examples: $40 million spent to defeat Sherrod Brown and $10 million spent to defeat Katie Porter. He describes both as showcase examples of crypto’s political muscle.
But Wong says this was not a grassroots effort fueled by millions of small retail donors. Instead, all of the money came from roughly 40 crypto firms and wealthy crypto backers. Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and Ripple alone accounted for more than 80% of the total, he says. In other words, the biggest intermediaries in the sector helped fund the U.S. political machine.
Republicans have power, but the bill still has not advanced
Wong also argues that the Clarity Act’s stalled progress says something about how Washington works. After the 2024 election, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House, and they also had a president supportive of crypto. Even so, they still failed to push through a market structure bill for digital assets.
He notes that the measure has already missed timelines that supporters had once floated, including July 4 and the period before the August recess. At this point, he says, the bill has only been scheduled for a procedural Senate vote on whether it will be taken up, and that vote is widely seen on Capitol Hill as one it will lose.
For Wong, the key issue is where the campaign money went. He says Fairshake, the largest crypto super PAC, spent all of its 2024 political attack-ad budget targeting Democrats, while spending nothing against Republicans. That means Republicans have little political need to carry the bill all the way through.
Wong’s description of the system is stark: in a lobbying-driven political structure, if politicians do not get money or face a credible threat, they do not lift your business forward.
He says Democrats still have room to offer a different path
Wong does not argue that Democrats are shut out of the debate. He says lawmakers could still draft a bill that protects intermediaries in the way Clarity does while also taking crypto technology itself seriously.
That approach, in his view, would avoid treating decentralized protocols as if they were intermediaries. Instead, it would set disclosure, governance, and security standards for developers, giving the public something more solid than fragmented posts on Crypto Twitter when judging whether a project is credible.
Wong says the people missing from the current debate are the developers building decentralized protocols, the users who self-custody assets and transact peer to peer, and ordinary people who benefit when intermediaries can be bypassed.
Washington has spent years treating the crypto sector as a single political constituency, he argues. The job for Democrats now is to draw sharper distinctions inside that category. If they do not, the next phase of crypto legislation will still be shaped by Washington’s intermediary-first approach, and the people using decentralized technology most directly will keep paying the price.