Charles Hoskinson has rejected claims that the Clarity Act is a clear win for the crypto industry, arguing that the bill in its current form would have classified XRP as a security if Ripple were launched today. In the same interview, he said Ethereum and ADA would also face securities treatment at the start under the framework now being discussed.
Hoskinson says the “mature blockchain” test creates a dead end
His criticism centers on the bill’s mature blockchain standard. According to Hoskinson, a new network must show community growth, liquidity, and broad token distribution to move beyond securities status. The problem, he said, is that projects usually need exchange listings and investment to build those conditions in the first place. If a token is treated as a security from day one, that path becomes extremely hard to access.
He argued that XRP won its court battle under an ambiguous legal environment, and that the outcome would look very different under the current Clarity Act structure. In his view, the ambiguity the industry spent years attacking also gave early crypto networks room to grow before regulators could lock them into a fixed category. This bill removes that ambiguity and replaces it with a default setup that hits new launches first.
Established networks may benefit while newer ones get boxed out
Hoskinson said large and already decentralized networks such as Cardano, XRP, and Ethereum would likely qualify for commodity treatment because they already meet the mature blockchain threshold. That may work well for those projects. His point was blunt: what helps incumbents does not automatically help the industry as a whole.
He described the proposal as a bill built for incumbents. Cardano would pass, XRP would pass, and Ethereum would pass, he said, because those networks are already large enough and established enough under the current standard. The pressure falls on newer teams trying to launch in the U.S. market. If early-stage projects cannot survive the initial classification hurdle, the next generation of crypto networks may never get off the ground there.
He also framed the bill as a future political tool
Hoskinson’s warning did not stop with market structure. He said a later administration could use the same framework in a more hostile way and keep every new project inside the securities bucket. In that interview, he specifically warned that Democrats could “weaponise” the bill and structure enforcement so that new crypto projects are always treated as securities.
He paired that point with a question about stablecoins, asking why Brian Armstrong is fighting so hard to avoid securities treatment for his stablecoin if that label is supposedly manageable. Hoskinson’s broader argument is that the current Clarity Act may offer relief to mature tokens, while closing the door on projects that have not yet reached scale.