Artificer

$USDC supply grew all year. $CRCL lost 60% of its market cap over the same time. The market now prices Circle at 22 cents per dollar of USDC it issues. Twelve months ago it was 70 cents. What does the market know?

This team does a good job of pressing Lummis on where *Republicans* are at on Clarity Act, given some of the squishiness we’ve reported. Lummis acknowledges that the banking sector has made in-roads with some GOP senators but aims most of her fire on Democrats.

Realities of CLARITY Act expectations and Senate Rules and Math: Senate floor time is the most valuable commodity in Washington. The Senate is scheduled to leave August 7 — leaving roughly two weeks. Under Senate Rule XXII, once cloture is invoked on a major bill, that measure becomes the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until it is disposed of. You generally cannot advance other contested legislation at the same time. Even nominations require unanimous consent to interrupt (meaning every single Senator must agree — one objection blocks it). That’s an important constraint on what else can move. That means hard choices on priorities have to be set for the larger agenda. Major bills that could come to the floor in this short window include CLARITY, the SAVE Act, a Russian sanctions bill, budget-related legislation, or the NIL bill, ect. Choosing to advance any one of them will come at the expense of the others, because the Senate can effectively process only one major contested measure at a time. Even if CLARITY were brought up today, the procedural steps — cloture → amendment process → second cloture → up to 30 hours of debate — make finishing before recess extremely difficult without UC agreement to waive process, which is rare on contested bills. I know many people are disappointed it won’t clear by early August. That does not mean CLARITY is done for the year. The bill includes critical protections for everyday crypto users. If a crypto exchange goes bankrupt, customers’ assets are currently at risk of being treated as the exchange’s property and used to pay off the company’s debts — leaving regular people with nothing. CLARITY’s bankruptcy remoteness provisions help prevent that outcome and keep customers’ crypto from being swept up to satisfy the exchange’s creditors. That real-world protection is one of the core reasons this legislation matters. Having the text out for people to read and digest over the recess, while the hard-working Senate staff continue building toward consensus, can still set up quicker movement in September. Every step is progress.