Corporate political donations in the United States reached a record $646m during the 18 months to June, with the crypto sector accounting for $206m, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by Public Citizen.
Crypto, artificial intelligence and online betting companies together spent $344m – more than half of the total – as the digital-asset industry seeks to shape the next phase of regulation in Washington.
The lobbying effort comes after several significant developments. The GENIUS Act has established a federal framework for payment stablecoins, while the Securities and Exchange Commission is rewriting crypto rules under Chair Paul Atkins. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is also working to move more digital-asset trading onshore.
The Senate is due to hold a cloture vote on 15 September on a motion to begin consideration of the CLARITY Act. The procedural vote requires 60 senators to support it in order to limit debate.
The industry’s priority is no longer simply to stop regulation by enforcement or demand clarity over which rules apply. Founders and investors consulted for the report say they now want Congress to turn recent advances into legislation that cannot easily be reversed by a future administration.
Utkarsh Ahuja, founder of Moon Pursuit Capital, said the sector had moved beyond merely asking for rules.
“A regulatory frameworkthat can swing with each new administration gets priced directly into where that capital goes. Serious long-term bets are hard to make when asset classification, agency jurisdiction, and compliance requirements could all move again in four years.”
Ahuja said long-term confidence depended on the durability of the framework. SEC Chair Paul Atkins made a similar argument on 18 August, saying legislation was essential to establish rules “future-proofed” enough to prevent a future regulator simply undoing the current SEC’s work.
The House of Representatives passed the CLARITY Act by 294 votes to 134 in July 2025. The legislation would establish a system under which the SEC and CFTC jointly regulate the offering and sale of digital commodities, addressing the long-running dispute over which agency has jurisdiction.
Ahuja, Ryan Kirkley of Global Settlement Network and Parth Kapadia of OpenVPP each independently identified completion of the market-structure legislation as their main priority.
The Senate vote could determine whether the issue is resolved by the next Congress. If cloture succeeds and the bill eventually becomes law, the industry could shift its attention towards banking access, taxation and protections for non-custodial platforms.
If the vote fails, or the CLARITY Act does not pass, market structure is likely to remain crypto’s central political battle through the midterm elections. Control of congressional committees and chamber leadership would then become significantly more important to the sector than it was a year earlier.
Kirkley is calling for federal regulatory sandboxes that would allow start-ups to test settlement infrastructure under supervision “without needing a megabank’s compliance budget on day one”. He also wants updated bank charters and direct access to payment networks.
“ambiguity taxes every founder building here.”
His argument is that crypto businesses should have access to the financial infrastructure available to banks, rather than merely receiving confirmation from regulators that they are permitted to operate.
Stablecoin rules are another concern. Kirkley said implementation of the GENIUS Act must remain workable for new entrants, warning that overly restrictive requirements could create an advantage for established firms and shut off the open market the legislation was intended to develop.
The total market capitalisation of stablecoins is close to $303.7bn. On 1 September, 21 financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi and Deutsche Bank, announced plans to launch a jointly owned dollar-pegged stablecoin by early 2027.
However, not all policymakers and financial institutions share Washington’s enthusiasm. BIS chief Pablo Hernandez de Cos has argued that stablecoins do not yet credibly operate as a large-scale means of payment, while suggesting tokenised deposits offer a more promising alternative.
Kapadia’s proposals focus on emerging uses of digital assets. He cited the example of a homeowner’s battery connected to a virtual power plant, earning thousands of small crypto-denominated payments for supplying electricity or responding to changes in grid conditions.
Cynthia Lummis’s digital-asset tax proposal contains a $300 de minimis exemption designed to prevent consumers having to record every small crypto transaction. It does not, however, cover property held to generate income.
Kapadia said that exclusion could affect households earning automated crypto income from physical infrastructure, because a battery enrolled in a virtual power plant would be regarded as income-producing property.
He proposed an aggregation rule under which a year’s worth of micro-settlements would be treated as one taxable basis event. The practical classification of an enrolled battery would still require confirmation from tax advisers.
Kapadia also wants Congress to create a federal route for non-custodial settlement platforms. His argument is that a service which coordinates payments without ever controlling customer funds should not need to obtain money-transmitter licences in all 50 states.
The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, introduced by Cynthia Lummis and Wyden, would remove developers and infrastructure providers without control of user funds from money-transmitter status. Senate material connected to the CLARITY Act describes similar safeguards for software developers who never control customer assets.
Kapadia’s proposal would build on those measures and seek to make the protections durable enough to prevent state-by-state licensing requirements from recreating the same regulatory problem.
His final request concerns tokenised assets linked to measurable physical output, including renewable-energy certificates and verified megawatt-hour receipts. He believes such assets should fall under commodity regulation.
Tokenised real-world assets have more than tripled since the beginning of 2025, reaching almost $39bn on 1 September. That means the market-structure debate also covers digital receipts for electricity, grid capacity and other machine-measured outputs.
The industry now faces two possible outcomes. In one, the Senate clears the 15 September cloture vote and the CLARITY Act becomes law, allowing the next Congress to address banking, tax treatment and non-custodial safeguards without reopening the basic question of regulatory jurisdiction.
That result would provide institutional investors with the predictability Ahuja says they require, while turning crypto’s record political expenditure into legislation that a future administration could not easily undo.
In the other, cloture fails or the bill stalls before final passage. Market structure would then remain the sector’s principal political fight into a midterm election that could put congressional committees under different leadership.
Under that scenario, the uncertainty identified by Ahuja would remain. Investors could continue to apply a discount to US crypto policy because of its volatility, while the industry’s record spending would secure political attention but not the lasting rules its founders say they need.
The wider question is how much of the financial system the crypto sector will be allowed to help rebuild.
Gino Matos is a law school graduate and journalist with six years of experience in the crypto industry. His main area of expertise is the Brazilian blockchain sector.
Liam Wright, also known as “Akiba”, is a reporter, podcast producer and editor-in-chief of CryptoSlate. He believes decentralised technology has the potential to make a significant contribution.
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