GSR legal chief: Clarity Act under 50% to pass this session

Joshua Riezman, chief legal and strategy officer at crypto market maker GSR, said at Consensus Miami on Wednesday that the Clarity Act has under a 50% chance of becoming law during the current congressional session.

The bill previously passed the House and is now stalled in the Senate, where separate drafts from the Banking and Agriculture committees have slowed progress. The main Senate hold-up centers on rules for stablecoin yield-whether stablecoins may earn rewards or interest-and how those products should be regulated.

Bipartisan Senate staff have worked daily for months to narrow the differences, and negotiators reached a compromise that neither side finds fully satisfactory, Riezman said. He tied the intensified yield debate to growth in stablecoins and the presence of other regulatory proposals that prompted the banking lobby to seek tighter limits on yield-bearing stablecoin products.

Riezman also cited unresolved questions about the president and his family’s ties to the crypto industry as an added complication. More than 100 amendments addressing stablecoins, ethics and decentralized finance were filed ahead of a Senate Banking Committee markup, and labor unions have publicly opposed the bill.

On the bill’s prospects, Riezman estimated it was “probably sub 50% right now personally, but that's not zero.” He warned that if the Clarity Act fails to advance this session, it would likely be delayed for a significant period and could harm U.S. competitiveness in digital assets and leave consumers without the protections the bill aims to provide. “There's really nobody who wins in that scenario,” he said.

Some other industry figures expect the bill to clear the Senate this summer and have urged banks to accept the compromise on offer. Riezman attributed the split in expectations to a mix of policy, lobbying and political concerns shaping the final language.

On industry trends, Riezman offered market estimates and forecasts. He put stablecoins at roughly $300 billion, tokenized U.S. Treasurys at about $15 billion, and tokenized private credit near $3 billion. He predicted the stablecoin market could grow to between $1 trillion and $3 trillion and said he expects a meaningful portion of companies listed on major U.S. exchanges to be tokenized in the coming years. “There's no reason in my mind that’s not going to one trillion, two trillion, three trillion dollars,” he said.

Riezman added that tokenization-as-a-service will quickly commoditize and that the main economic benefits will flow to end investors through more direct stock-borrow economics and to fund issuers through wider limited partner distribution, rather than to any single layer of infrastructure.