Senate Rejects CLARITY Act 50-49, Sending XRP Down 9% and Bitcoin to Monthly Low

The U.S. Senate failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Tuesday, voting 50 to 49, well short of the 60-vote threshold required for the pivotal procedural hurdle. The bill, which would have formally divided crypto oversight between the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, giving the CFTC the larger share of authority, had been years in the making. With Congress now done for the year, the legislation's path forward is deeply uncertain, and at least one Republican Senate aide described the bill as dead, though Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said he would continue pushing it.

XRP bore the sharpest losses of any major token, falling roughly 9% to around $1.28, a decline analysts attributed to aggressive selling: trading data showed XRP's cumulative volume delta plunging to negative 10.5 million. Despite the selloff, U.S. spot XRP ETFs continued to hold approximately 1.1 billion tokens, leaving open the question of whether sustained institutional demand can support the price. Ether fell 4.5%, Solana dropped 5.4%, and the GMCI 30 Index of the top 30 cryptocurrencies was down 4.16%. Bitcoin slid from roughly $77,000 to a monthly low near $75,000 before partially recovering to below $76,000.

The sell-off reflects how much of the crypto sector, XRP in particular, had priced in regulatory clarity from the bill. Critics of the legislation had argued that routing most oversight to the CFTC, a far smaller agency than the SEC, was designed to limit regulatory scrutiny of the industry. Attention now turns to the Federal Reserve's Wednesday rate decision as the next major macro catalyst for crypto markets.