The fate of the CLARITY Act hinges on Trump’s ethics, so the odds aren’t looking great. Prediction market volumes hit new highs, and more news.
Polymarket suggests the odds of the CLARITY Act passing this year are just 40%, after a raft of Democratic Senators, including Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, spoke out against the bill. A crucial Senate vote could happen as early as this week, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune stating it will definitely be held before Aug. 10.Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren is trying to spoil the vote by highlighting how much money President Donald Trump has extracted from the industry. She demanded Trump voluntarily release his crypto earnings for this year, after his 2025 disclosure showed he earned more than a billion dollars from crypto last year. The controversy means that Senate Democrats are unlikely to support the bill without a provision banning elected officials promoting or issuing cryptocurrency.
Summer Mersinger, the CEO of the Blockchain Association and a former commissioner at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said: “Ethics is the big elephant in the room.”
Crypto markets continued to flounder in the second quarter, with the notable exception of prediction markets.
Spot trading volume across the top 10 centralized exchanges (CEXs) fell from $2.7 trillion in the first quarter to just $1.95 trillion in the second, according to CoinGecko’s latest Crypto Industry Report.
CEX perps volume also declined 10% to $12.7 trillion, while the stablecoin market slipped 1.6% to $305.1 billion. In contrast, prediction markets recorded their strongest quarter on record with $113.8 billion in notional volume.
Polymarket’s World Cup winner market alone has attracted more than $3.3 billion in trading volume, while contracts tied to the 2028 US presidential election rank among the platform’s largest markets, according to Polymarketscan data.
Meanwhile, France’s National Gambling Authority has just ordered internet service providers to block access to Polymarket as it considers prediction markets to be illegal gambling.
Polymarket is blocked in 33 countries... unless you have a VPN of course.
Strategy became a symbol of the dot-com crash: Could history repeat?
The US Senate has adopted a resolution opposing executive clemency for former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
The measure cannot block a presidential pardon but reflects bipartisan Senate opposition.
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