Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the Senate Clarity Act is "ready to get a yes vote" ahead of a Sept. 15 procedural vote that needs 60 votes to advance, with ethics provisions still under negotiation. Armstrong said the industry gets regulatory clarity either way, pointing to SEC and CFTC rulemaking that Coinbase's policy chief expects to exceed 100 rules if the bill stalls.
Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong told CNBC on Wednesday that the Senate has the votes to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and that the industry gets a federal rulebook either way — through legislation on Sept. 15 or through more than 100 rules the SEC and CFTC are preparing to publish.
"If it passes, great, we've got legislation," Armstrong said in the interview. "Frankly, if it doesn't pass, it's also going to be a good outcome because the SEC and the CFTC have said that they're ready to publish rulemaking, and we're going to get regulatory clarity one way or another on the 15th or the day or two after."
The bill, introduced in May 2025 and passed by the House last July, would divide oversight of digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would supervise tokens classified as securities, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which would cover decentralized commodities such as bitcoin. The Senate vote scheduled for Sept. 15 is a procedural motion to proceed, which requires 60 votes to clear the chamber's cloture threshold — a bar that has become the central obstacle.
Coinbase policy chief Faryar Shirzad told industry advocate Scott Melker on Sept. 6 that the company is not assuming all 53 Senate Republicans will support the motion. Each Republican defection raises the number of Democratic votes needed to reach 60, leaving the outcome dependent on a handful of senators. Shirzad described a scenario Washington calls a jailbreak, in which support from a few Democrats gives other lawmakers political cover to vote yes once bipartisan backing becomes visible.
The unresolved language is the bill's ethics provisions covering elected officials' digital asset holdings. Armstrong said the White House "has already put out an offer on the table that has a very strong ethics provision," while Democrats "have requested something a little bit beyond that, which would include divestiture." He added the two sides "appear to be very close to a solution."
Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona framed the arithmetic bluntly at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium last month: "The way to get 60 votes is with good ethics legislation as well as rounding out some of the things that are still outstanding."
If cloture fails, the burden shifts to the agencies. Shirzad said he expects the SEC and CFTC to pursue more than 100 rules covering much of the ground Congress left unaddressed, aiming to reproduce elements of the bill's framework through regulatory action rather than statute. That path carries different risk: agency rules can be rewritten by a subsequent administration, face notice-and-comment delays, and are exposed to litigation in a way that enacted legislation is not.
Armstrong said the "must-have issues" Coinbase had previously raised "have now been resolved," and that the bill carries backing from law enforcement groups, banks and crypto companies. He said hundreds of pages of input from both sides produced the bipartisan compromise now before the Senate.
Not every bank is on board. JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon has accused Coinbase of using the bill's stablecoin provisions for regulatory arbitrage against banks. Armstrong, without naming Dimon, said critics with large payments businesses face a "competitive issue" and are "talking their own book." He pointed to Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon and Fidelity as backers of the legislation. The American Bankers Association has separately urged senators to close what it calls a loophole involving stablecoin interest and yield, and flagged concerns from senators in both parties about effects on local lending.
The policy outcome lands on a company already under financial pressure. Coinbase reported second-quarter revenue of $1.2 billion, down from $1.5 billion a year earlier, and a net loss of $359.5 million against a profit of $1.43 billion in the year-ago period — missing Wall Street's expectations for revenue and earnings for a third straight quarter. Shares have fallen nearly 23% so far this year.
About half of Coinbase's revenue comes from trading, and Armstrong said crypto spot trading has "basically been down for the last year." The company has expanded into stocks, commodities and foreign exchange, with non-trading revenue from stablecoin and institutional custody. Armstrong described passage of the Clarity Act as a "regulatory checkbox" that could unlock institutional capital and open the door to products such as tokenized equities in the U.S. "It'd be a big milestone."
Coinbase has also built out operations in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, which Armstrong called its Asia hub — a hedge he said mattered during periods when the U.S. regulatory environment was less permissive. "We basically just try to grow when we have windows and we try to bide our time in the areas where we're sensing hostility," he said.
Armstrong also said Coinbase-built infrastructure handles more than 90% of the roughly 165 million agentic payments executed to date, running on Base, the blockchain the company created, with the x402 protocol and USDC. He reiterated a bitcoin target of $400,000 by 2030, calling it "a reasonable target."
For U.S.-listed crypto equities, the Sept. 15 vote is a binary event with a soft landing attached. Passage would give exchanges, brokers and stablecoin issuers a statutory framework and remove a compliance discount that has weighed on the sector's valuation. A failed cloture vote pushes the timeline to agency rulemaking, where the scope of clarity is broader but the durability is weaker — leaving a regulatory risk premium on the sector into 2027.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
