Crypto Firms Spent $8 Million Lobbying For The CLARITY Act. The Effort Failed.

The cryptocurrency industry spent about $8 million on lobbying efforts connected to the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act during the first half of 2026, part of a broader push to shape federal rules governing digital assets as the legislation moved through Congress.

An analysis of federal lobbying disclosures by CoinDesk found that crypto companies and industry groups spent more than $13 million on lobbying during the six-month period, with roughly $8 million tied through disclosure language to the market-structure legislation. Because lobbying reports can cover several issues at once, the filings do not specify how much of every reported dollar was devoted exclusively to the CLARITY Act.

The spending did not result in the bill advancing through the Senate this month. Senators voted 49-50 on Sept. 15 against invoking cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, according to the Senate. The procedural motion required 60 votes. Four Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, joined Democrats in voting against cloture, while Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware did not vote. Tillis voted no so that he could move to reconsider the vote.

That vote came more than a year after the CLARITY Act cleared the House with significant bipartisan support. The Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives recorded a 294-134 vote for passage on July 17, 2025, including 216 Republicans and 78 Democrats voting in favor.

The legislation was designed to establish a federal market structure for digital assets and clarify the respective roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. A congressional committee report on H.R. 3633 said the measure would give the CFTC jurisdiction over digital commodities while clarifying the SEC's authority over investment contracts involving digital commodities. It also set out rules for secondary-market trading and customer protections for entities registered with the two regulators.

A Congressional Research Service analysis said the legislation would generally expand CFTC authority over assets defined as digital commodities while narrowing the SEC's jurisdiction in some areas. The measure also included a process under which an issuer could notify the SEC that a digital asset had reached, or was expected to reach, a sufficiently mature status under the framework established by the bill.

Coinbase was the biggest individual spender in the lobbying campaign identified by CoinDesk, spending about $2.2 million during the first half of the year on lobbying that included advocacy related to the CLARITY Act. Kraken spent nearly $1 million, while Digital Currency Group, Jump Crypto and Paradigm were also among the larger spenders associated with the legislation.

Money paid to external firms was spread widely. CoinDesk identified at least 42 outside lobbying shops that received money from crypto companies and groups in the first two quarters of 2026. Checkmate Government Relations received about $1.8 million in crypto-related payments during the period, much of it from Binance, while Sternhell Group received about $660,000 from digital-asset clients.

Not all of the industry's lobbying spending explicitly named the CLARITY Act. CoinDesk found another roughly $5.4 million in spending where disclosures used broader descriptions covering areas such as cryptocurrency, financial services, taxes, digital-asset mining or regulatory policy. That means the disclosure records do not allow the full industrywide amount devoted solely to the bill to be calculated precisely.

Some individual federal filings illustrate those broader descriptions. One lobbying disclosure filed with the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act database described work involving "digital assets, crypto currencies, blockchain and related legislation" and listed the White House, Treasury Department, House and Senate among the government bodies contacted.

Trade associations were also heavily involved. Blockchain Association Chief Policy Officer Lindsay Fraser told CoinDesk that the organization met with congressional staff and federal officials more than 380 times and organized five member fly-ins and 15 staff briefings covering market structure, decentralized finance, taxation and national security.

Coinbase spokesperson Julia Krieger also defended the company's lobbying effort, telling CoinDesk that its in-house team and outside advisers helped move bipartisan market-structure legislation close to passage and contributed to the broader regulatory debate.

The Senate's Sept. 15 vote left H.R. 3633 without the votes needed to move forward on the procedural motion. The official Senate record shows the measure remains the same House-passed bill that lawmakers have been considering as part of the broader debate over federal oversight of digital-asset markets.