Europe has no US crypto law to line up with, according to Hedera (@hedera) chief policy officer Nilmini Rubin (@nilminirubin), after the CLARITY Act stalled in the US Senate. The setback leav
Europe has no US crypto law to line up with, according to Hedera (@hedera) chief policy officer Nilmini Rubin (@nilminirubin), after the CLARITY Act stalled in the US Senate. The setback leaves a planned EU-US effort on mutual recognition of crypto rules without an American counterpart to work with.
Rubin said a European government leader told her the EU had hoped to work this year on getting the EU and US to recognize each other's crypto rules. Now they "don't really have anything to be equivalent with," she recalled. She made the comments on an Atlantic Council (@ACGeoEcon) panel at last week's IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok.
The bill, a US crypto market structure measure, hit a wall on September 15. The Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act after a 49-50 vote against invoking cloture on the motion to proceed, falling short of the 60 votes required, according to law firm Paul Hastings.
The vote was procedural. Senators were voting on whether to end debate and proceed to consideration of the measure.Every Democrat who voted opposed the motion, and four Republicans also voted no. Reporting indicates the dispute centered on ethics language covering officials' crypto holdings. Sen. Cynthia Lummis blamed Democrats, who cite unresolved ethics rules tied to Trump's crypto ventures.
The bill is not formally dead. Senator Thom Tillis entered a motion to reconsider the failed cloture vote, leaving a procedural route to revisit the bill without guaranteeing the necessary support. Even so, no date has been set, and the November midterms shorten the calendar.
Rubin also said the SEC and CFTC are now writing crypto rules instead. That matches the Paul Hastings account, which noted that SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig each pledged to deliver crypto rules under existing statutory authority.
Agency rulemaking may move faster than Congress, but it offers a less settled footing for international coordination than a statute would. That is a concern for firms operating across the Atlantic, where Rubin has argued that rules for tokenized markets need to work across borders.
In a Bretton Woods Committee piece ahead of the Bangkok meetings, Rubin and Hedera colleague Isadora Arredondo wrote that stablecoins face different regulatory frameworks in the United States and the European Union, and the same dollar stablecoin faces very different reserve, redemption and licensing requirements depending on which side of the Atlantic it is held.
For Hedera, which positions its network for enterprise and institutional use, regulatory alignment between the two largest Western markets is a practical issue. Without a US statute, any EU-US equivalence process has to wait for either a revived CLARITY Act or finalized agency rules.
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