Published Sep 16, 2026 · CoinDesk
The Clarity Act fell short of 60 votes in the Senate. CoinDesk rounds up how crypto and banking leaders, including Matter Labs, are reading the outcome.
The U.S. Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act on September 15, leaving the crypto industry without the statutory market structure framework it had lobbied for. CoinDesk gathered reactions from executives across exchanges, trading firms, blockchain foundations and legal teams.
The consensus was measured rather than alarmed. Most pointed out that the SEC and CFTC have already begun rulemaking under existing authority, so the day-to-day regulatory picture does not revert to where it stood a few years ago. The open question is durability: agency rules can be rewritten by the next administration, while legislation would have been far harder to undo. Several voices also warned that continued U.S. uncertainty gives an advantage to jurisdictions like the EU, where MiCA already provides a defined rulebook.
Vassilis Tziokas, VP Growth at Matter Labs, argued the vote shifted the timeline in Washington without changing the direction of travel in banking. Banks are already deploying tokenized deposit networks that move dollars onchain around the clock while deposits remain on their own balance sheets under existing rules, and that same infrastructure is being extended to intraday repo, weekend collateral movement and tokenized securities, with bank-grade privacy as a baseline requirement. He expects regulators to carry more of the load in the interim, summarizing: "A stalled bill delays the rulebook, not the building."
Matter Labs open-sources Prividium's permissioning engine so institutions can run a permissioned chain in their own environment — Bundesbank tests it first.
Matter Labs' Vassilis Tziokas argues in CoinDesk that no market structure bill can make bank deposit networks interoperable — that comes from architecture and clearing, not legislation.
