The Weekly Take: The Senate Failed CLARITY. Four Agencies Then Shipped Nine Crypto Actions in Seven Business Days.

The CLARITY Act lost its cloture vote on 15 September. Between that date and 1 October, the SEC, CFTC, Federal Reserve and OCC published or advanced nine distinct crypto-related regulatory actions. Not opinions. Not speeches. Actions in the Federal Register, the OMB queue or formal exemptive orders — all of them landing in seven business days. The agencies did more in seventeen days than the 119th Congress has done on crypto market structure in twenty-one months. The arithmetic is the article.

Jason Jones, Editor in Chief · 2 October 2026 · 12 min read

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Two weeks ago, this column argued that the CLARITY Act’s 49–50 cloture failure did not change the rules being written for crypto in the United States, because the rules were already being written somewhere else. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said as much the day after the vote. His exact phrasing, posted 16 September: “with or without legislation, we will act decisively within the SEC’s statutory authority.”

That claim was testable. The test window ran from 15 September to 1 October — the Troutman digest’s weekly cutoff. If “with or without legislation” was rhetoric, the two and a half weeks after the Senate failure should have been quiet: agencies pausing to let political pressure resolve. If it was a description of what was already happening, the window should have shown movement at a cadence no congressional process matches.

Here is the count.

Seventeen days, nine actions, four agencies

Pulled from the Troutman Pepper Locke digest for the week ending 1 October 2026, cross-checked against the Paul Hastings tracker and primary agency press releases.¹

Date	Agency	Action
17 Sept	SEC	Granted five-year “Innovation Exemption” permitting tokenized securities venues to trade tokenized NMS stocks through automated market makers without exchange registration, subject to volume limits and smart-contract auditability conditions.2
17 Sept	SEC	Issued no-action letter to eToro clearing zero-cash brokerage accounts where customer funds remain at banks or FinCEN-registered MSBs.3
17 Sept	CFTC	Extended Phantom-style no-action relief to all passive software providers routing users to registered intermediaries, allowing revenue-sharing without IB registration.4
17 Sept	CFTC	Transmitted “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions” and “Regulation Crypto Asset Markets” to the White House OMB for review at the prerule stage — a step toward a parallel market-structure rulemaking.5
18 Sept	OCC	Granted conditional national trust charters to Bastion Platforms, Catena Trust Bank and Agora National Trust Bank, expanding stablecoin and custody service capacity.6
21 Sept	SEC	Granted exemptive relief to the ARK Venture Fund for a tokenized share class tradable on alternative trading systems — a 1940 Act exemptive order built around a tokenized class.7
24 Sept	Fed	Proposed two rules implementing the GENIUS Act’s payment-stablecoin framework for Board-supervised institutions, covering reserves, redemption, capital, anti-tying and application process.8
24 Sept	CFTC	Updated blockchain recordkeeping FAQs for registrants’ use of tokenized collateral and distributed ledgers.9
25 Sept	SEC	Division of Corporation Finance released staff FAQs interpreting the March 2026 joint guidance on crypto asset classification, “functionality” and “decentralization” definitions, and marketing representations of managerial efforts.10

That is nine distinct federal actions across the Securities and Exchange Commission (four), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (three), Federal Reserve Board (one) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (one), all dated within seven business days, 17 to 25 September. The CLARITY Act, which was supposed to settle the SEC/CFTC jurisdictional split, failed cloture on day one of this window.

Three of the nine actions directly address territory that CLARITY would have covered: the CFTC’s two draft rules sent to OMB (an executive-branch version of market-structure legislation), the SEC’s tokenized-stock Innovation Exemption (a jurisdictional carve-out created by agency action rather than statute), and the SEC’s CorpFin FAQs (a staff-level interpretation that functions, until superseded, as the governing read of the federal securities laws for crypto issuers). A fourth — the Fed’s GENIUS Act proposal — fills a gap this column identified on 21 August as unlikely to close before the statutory effective date. It has not fully closed yet. But it moved.

The agencies did not comment on the CLARITY vote in their releases. They did not need to. The ledger is the comment.

The Fed’s GENIUS proposal, which is the one that matters

Of the nine, the single action with the most downstream consequence is the Federal Reserve Board’s proposal on 24 September implementing the GENIUS Act for the institutions under its supervision.

On 21 August, this column counted every Federal Register document mentioning the GENIUS Act and found 31 — 18 proposed rules, 11 notices, 2 final rules, neither of the finals implementing the statute. We flagged 20 September as the drop-dead date for publishing final rules with a full 120-day transition before the 18 January 2027 statutory backstop. Nobody made 20 September. We said then that the transition window would compress to whatever days remained between whenever final rules actually appeared and the statutory effective date, and that the arithmetic was now subtractive rather than legislative.

Four days after that date passed, the Federal Reserve Board proposed its piece.⁸ Not a final rule — a proposal, with a 60-day comment period from Federal Register publication on 29 September. Comments close roughly 28 November. The structure: Proposal 1 establishes reserve-backing requirements (short-term Treasury bills and other high-quality liquid assets), capital requirements, risk-management standards, safekeeping rules, and permissible-activity definitions for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers. Proposal 2 establishes a streamlined approval pathway with business-plan requirements, financial disclosure, appeals and hearings procedures, and final determination protocols. Together they cover the subset of the stablecoin universe sitting inside Fed-supervised depository institutions and their subsidiaries.

What this does for the arithmetic: assuming the Fed finalizes roughly 30 days after the comment window closes — which is faster than ordinary, but the Fed has reasons to move — a final Fed rule lands around the turn of the year. With the other GENIUS regulators still working their own rulemakings on parallel tracks, the 120-day transition clock might start before the 18 January 2027 backstop if everything goes right. The most likely case is still that 18 January governs and the compressed transition we projected on 21 August is what issuers get.

The point is that the Fed’s proposal, published four days after the window we flagged closed, is the Board’s first rulemaking to materially address the GENIUS implementation gap. Strictly, it is not an example of “with or without legislation”: the Fed is implementing a statute Congress did pass. What it shows is the implementing agencies moving on their own clock rather than waiting for the political calendar to settle — the same posture, applied to the one crypto law that exists.

The CFTC’s parallel-track market structure rulemaking

The second most consequential action in the window, and in some respects the one with the longest shadow, is the CFTC’s 17 September submission of two draft rulemakings to the White House OMB: Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets.⁵

Set the sequence. On 15 September, the Senate failed to advance a bill that would have, among other things, allocated jurisdictional authority between the SEC and CFTC for crypto assets. On 17 September — two business days later — the CFTC transmitted to OMB two rulemakings whose titles point squarely at the market-structure territory CLARITY would have codified. The agency is not waiting for Congress to pass the SEC/CFTC split. It is moving to write its side of the split as regulation.

OMB review is not finalization, and the submission is at the prerule stage. The rules have not been published in the Federal Register. We have not read the text, because the text is not yet public, and we are not characterizing what it says. What we know from the submission alone is: the CFTC has moved past the position-paper stage and into the White House review queue, two days after the Senate rejected a bill the agency has been publicly waiting for.

Chair Mike Selig said on 16 September, the day after CLARITY failed, that the agency was “locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance,” as The Block reported. That phrase read as rhetoric on 16 September. On 17 September it was behavior.

The SEC’s four actions, read as a strategy

The SEC did more in the window than any other agency: four of the nine entries bear its name, including the Division of Corporation Finance FAQs that most affect ordinary issuers. Read as a set, the four SEC actions describe a particular theory of what to do when market-structure legislation fails.

The theory: do not try to replicate CLARITY by rule. Do what the SEC has always done — issue a succession of exemptive orders, no-action letters, staff interpretations, and small rulemakings that collectively redraw a boundary without ever formally relocating it.

The 17 September Innovation Exemption is a five-year conditional carve-out. The eToro no-action letter is a specific-fact-pattern clearance. The 21 September ARK Venture Fund tokenized share class is a one-fund exemptive order that establishes a precedent for the next fund that files. The 25 September CorpFin FAQs are staff interpretations without the force of a Commission rule. Any one of these could be withdrawn by a future SEC without a vote of Congress, which is both the mechanism’s weakness and the reason it is so fast. The CLARITY Act would have been a statute. These are a stack of administrative moves. The industry would prefer the statute. In its absence, it is getting the stack.

Chair Atkins’s “with or without legislation” line read as a promise on 16 September. In the post-CLARITY ledger it reads as a description.

The prediction-market detour

The window also contained a prediction-markets development that is adjacent to crypto rather than crypto proper, but is worth noting because it demonstrates a parallel version of the dynamic.

On 24 September, the New York Attorney General sued Polymarket for operating as an unlicensed gambling platform.¹¹ On the same day, the CFTC invoked emergency authority to keep Kalshi operating despite a parallel New York state attempt.¹² On 25 September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that Kalshi’s sports-event contracts do not qualify as CFTC-regulated “swaps” and that state gambling laws are not preempted by the Commodity Exchange Act.¹³

The federal agency and the federal court moved in opposite directions on the same question in the same week. The CFTC used emergency authority to protect federal jurisdiction over event contracts; the Sixth Circuit held that state gambling law is not displaced. This is not a settled question, and it is not one that CLARITY would have resolved either. It belongs in this piece because it demonstrates that the agencies are not merely acting — they are acting in ways that create new disputes faster than the slower branches can process the old ones.

The OCC and the three new trust charters

The 18 September OCC action is small in column inches and large in system effect.⁶ Three conditional national trust charters granted on one day to Bastion Platforms, Catena Trust Bank and Agora National Trust Bank. All three charters are stablecoin- and custody-adjacent — the sort of institutions the GENIUS Act envisions becoming the stablecoin-issuance infrastructure. Each applicant must still secure Federal Reserve bank stock before full approval, which means the OCC action is the first step in a chain that runs through the Federal Reserve before it produces an operating trust bank. All three applicants began this process before CLARITY failed. None of them paused when it did.

The OCC is the quietest of the four agencies in this ledger. It is also, mechanically, the one most likely to produce durable change — a national trust charter is not a staff interpretation or a five-year exemption. It is a bank, with a chartering document that outlasts administrations.

What this does not show

Two and a half weeks do not establish a trend. We have counted nine actions in a 13-business-day window. The next two weeks may be quieter, the window may turn out to have been bunching ahead of fiscal year-end on 30 September, and agencies routinely clear backlog in the last weeks of September for reasons that have nothing to do with CLARITY. Our claim is narrower than “the pace continues”: the claim is that the window after the Senate failure was not quiet, and the specific actions in the window advance the territory the Senate would have covered.

Volume is not substance. Nine actions is a count, not a measurement of policy weight. The CorpFin FAQs are staff-level and non-binding. The eToro no-action letter is specific to one broker’s fact pattern. Weighing the actions by consequence would produce a different list — the Fed GENIUS proposal, the CFTC OMB submission, and the OCC charters are each worth more than the number-of-items would suggest.

Durability is not the same as speed. Everything the agencies did in this window can be undone by a different Commission or a different Board. The CLARITY Act, had it become law, would have fixed the jurisdictional allocation at a level only Congress could change. That is a real cost the industry is paying for the current cadence, and we noted it on 18 September. Fast and reversible is not the same thing as slow and durable. It is also not the same thing as nothing.

We used one digest and one tracker as structural sources. Troutman Pepper Locke’s 1 October 2026 digest and the Paul Hastings crypto policy tracker are both published for client guidance, not for us. Their editorial judgments shape what is in the window and what is not. Someone running the Federal Register query directly would get a different count — likely larger, because the digests omit the technical and administrative actions that do not merit a client alert.

The Fed’s proposal is a proposal. Proposing a rule is not finalizing a rule, and historical base rates for comment-period-to-finalization at the Federal Reserve are longer than 60 days. The 28 November comment-close date is a floor on when a final rule can land, not a ceiling. Treating the Fed’s proposal as having fixed the GENIUS implementation gap would be wrong. Treating it as having started to fix it is accurate.

The CFTC/Sixth Circuit prediction-market split is unresolved. We described the week’s events on Kalshi and Polymarket. We did not predict how the jurisdictional conflict resolves, because there is nothing in the current record from which a prediction can be made that would survive the next ruling or the next CFTC action.

None of this is legal advice. It is a reading of a 13-business-day federal action window, cross-checked against two published trackers, with the arithmetic shown.

What would change our mind

A congressional revival of CLARITY this year. If a revised market-structure bill reaches the Senate floor and clears 60 votes before year-end, the “agencies substitute for statute” argument becomes a bridge rather than a replacement, and the nine actions in this window read as parallel work rather than substitute work. We see no path to this in the public record. Prediction markets price CLARITY-by-year-end at 6–8%.¹⁴

The next two-week window being materially quieter. If the 1 October–15 October window produces one or two actions rather than nine, the September cadence was bunching, not pattern. We will publish an update if that is what the next digest shows.

A court striking down one or more of the actions as outside agency authority. A judicial ruling that any of the SEC Innovation Exemption, the Fed GENIUS proposals, or the CFTC OMB rules exceeds the agency’s statutory grant would reset the “with or without legislation” argument from administrative to adjudicatory. Watch the Fifth and D.C. Circuits.

Chair Atkins or Chair Selig publicly conditioning further action on Congress. Either chair saying “we have now reached the limit of what we can do without legislation” would change the frame. Neither has said it.

Where this leaves us

A pattern that was testable on 16 September — “with or without legislation” — has produced an answer. In the 17 calendar days (13 business days) between the Senate’s cloture failure and the Troutman digest’s 1 October cutoff, four federal agencies published or advanced nine distinct crypto-related regulatory actions, all of them inside seven business days. Three of the nine directly address territory CLARITY was drafted to cover, and a fourth moves GENIUS implementation. The Fed proposed its GENIUS rules. The CFTC submitted market-structure rulemakings to OMB two days after the Senate failed to pass market-structure legislation. The OCC chartered three new national trusts. The SEC did four things — more than any other agency.

The 119th Congress has passed one crypto bill in nearly two years: the GENIUS Act, in July 2025. In seven business days this September, the agencies shipped nine actions. The ratio describes something structural about which branch of the federal government is actually in the business of writing crypto rules right now. It does not describe which branch should be. That is a different column.

Nine actions. Seven business days. Count what that means.

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Sources

All figures pulled 1–2 October 2026 and stated as of those dates. Agency actions cross-checked between the two tracker sources and, where possible, against primary agency press releases.

1. Troutman Pepper Locke, “Digital Assets + Blockchain Newsletter — October 1, 2026,” cross-referenced against the Paul Hastings “Crypto Policy Tracker” entry for the same week. See also Troutman Pepper Locke, “In the Wake of CLARITY Act’s Failure, Agencies Move Forward Without Congressional Action or Certainty.” ↩
2. SEC “Innovation Exemption” granting five-year conditional relief for tokenized securities venues trading tokenized NMS stocks through automated market makers, 17 September 2026. Conditions include volume limits, auditable smart contracts on public permissionless ledgers, and issuer notification before third-party tokenization. ↩
3. SEC Division of Trading and Markets no-action letter to eToro, 17 September 2026, clearing zero-cash brokerage account structures where customer funds remain at banks or FinCEN-registered money services businesses, with conditions including SIPC non-coverage disclosure and periodic MSB license verification. ↩
4. CFTC extension of Phantom-style no-action relief, 17 September 2026, to all passive software providers routing users to registered intermediaries, allowing revenue-sharing arrangements without introducing broker registration if providers refrain from holding assets or exercising discretion. ↩
5. CFTC submission of “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions” and “Regulation Crypto Asset Markets” to the White House Office of Management and Budget, 17 September 2026, at the prerule stage, two business days after the CLARITY Act’s Senate cloture failure. See The Defiant, “CFTC Files Crypto Market Rulemaking With White House at Prerule Stage.” ↩
6. OCC conditional national trust charters granted 18 September 2026 to Bastion Platforms, Catena Trust Bank and Agora National Trust Bank. Each applicant must secure Federal Reserve bank stock before full approval. See American Banker, “OCC approves trust charters for Bastion, Agora and Catena.” ↩
7. SEC exemptive order to ARK Venture Fund, 21 September 2026, granting relief to offer tokenized share classes tradable on alternative trading systems. See Interval Fund Tracker, “Tokenized Interval Funds and the ARK Venture Fund SEC Order.” ↩
8. Federal Reserve Board, two proposed rules implementing the GENIUS Act for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers, announced 24 September 2026 and published in the Federal Register 29 September 2026. Proposal 1 covers reserve backing, capital, risk management, safekeeping and permissible activities. Proposal 2 establishes application processes with business plan, financial information and appeals procedures. 60-day comment period from Federal Register publication, closing approximately 28 November 2026. See Troutman Pepper Locke, “Federal Reserve Proposes Comprehensive Regulatory Framework for Payment Stablecoins Under the GENIUS Act.” ↩
9. CFTC blockchain recordkeeping FAQ update, 24 September 2026, addressing registrant use of tokenized collateral and distributed ledger technology for recordkeeping requirements. ↩
10. SEC Division of Corporation Finance staff FAQs on crypto assets, 25 September 2026, interpreting March 2026 joint SEC/CFTC guidance and addressing issuer-provided definitions of “functionality” and “decentralization,” Staking Receipt Tokens distinctions, and when marketing communications constitute representations of managerial efforts under the Howey analysis. ↩
11. New York Attorney General v. Polymarket US, filed 24 September 2026 in New York state court, alleging operation as an unlicensed gambling platform, tax evasion and age-restriction violations. Polymarket countersued seeking declaratory relief on CFTC jurisdiction. ↩
12. CFTC emergency authority invocation, 24 September 2026, to maintain Kalshi Exchange operations despite a parallel New York state enforcement action. ↩
13. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruling, 25 September 2026, in the matter of KalshiEX event contracts, holding that sports-event contracts do not qualify as CFTC-regulated “swaps” under the Commodity Exchange Act and that state gambling laws are not preempted. Court held events must be “inherently associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence” to qualify as swaps. See CoinDesk, 25 September 2026. ↩
14. Polymarket “H.R. 3633 signed by Dec. 31, 2026”: 6.2%–6.3% YES bid/ask as of 23 September 2026. Kalshi “broader crypto market-structure legislation before Jan. 1, 2027”: 7.8%–8.4% YES bid/ask same period. ↩

This article is not legal advice. It describes agency press releases, OMB submission notices, and two published trackers for the 15 September–1 October 2026 window. Comments are closed sitewide. Corrections to corrections@coinagereport.com.