Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan Calls CLARITY Act Failure a Speed Bump, Not a Roadblock

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan has reversed his own warning. In January, he said a CLARITY Act failure could stall the 2026 crypto bull run, a call that kept markets fixed on the Senate calendar.

But in a 16 September client memo, one day after the Senate’s 49–50 cloture miss, Hougan called the defeat “a speed bump, not a roadblock.”

The bull market, he now argues, does not need Washington’s statute to keep running.

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Bitcoin Rallied While CLARITY Odds Collapsed, Hougan Points to Wall Street Instead

The core of Hougan’s argument is a price-versus-policy divergence. Bitcoin bottomed at $57,950 on 1 July. It peaked above $80,000 on 4 September.

Over that same stretch, Polymarket odds of 2026 passage fell from 39% to 18%. If the bull market needed the CLARITY Act, falling odds should have pulled prices lower. The opposite happened.

That is a notable shift. As recently as August, Hougan warned that sharply falling Polymarket odds could make crypto markets “wobble for a minute.”

The odds did fall, from 39% on 1 July to 18% on 15 September. Markets wobbled too, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP crashed after the cloture vote failed, with BTC dropping 3.7%, ETH losing 5.2%, and XRP sliding 7.3%. Yet Hougan’s new memo leads with the opposite lesson.

Wall Street did not wait for a statute, either. Last quarter, Robinhood launched its own blockchain. Morgan Stanley rolled out a Solana ETF.

DTCC settled its first batch of tokenized stock trades. These moves arrived while Hougan’s January warning that failure could stall the 2026 crypto bull run was still the dominant institutional read. Institutions built anyway.

The Senate’s 49-vote tally fell 11 votes short of the 60 needed for cloture. Every Democrat voted no.

Seven Democrats have since reopened talks, and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer is pointing to a post-midterm revival.

But the House is out until November, and the Senate’s plate is dominated by the 30 September funding deadline. The legislative path is long.

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Atkins and Selig Are Now the Trade, Hougan Says, Not a Second Cloture Rumor

Hougan’s pivot centers on two agency heads. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said the SEC is “ready, willing, and able” to write rules on everything the CLARITY Act would have covered.

CFTC Chair Mike Selig went further on 16 September, saying his agency is “locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance.”

Hougan argues the resulting rules could be “more pro-crypto than the Clarity Act itself,” because agency rulemaking does not need to buy Democratic votes on DeFi and illicit finance clauses.

The CFTC already moved first. The agency cleared passive software developers to build trading tools without broker registration, proof that Selig is shipping, not just signalling.

Meanwhile, the SEC and CFTC are seeking public comment on a harmonized framework for BTC, ETH, and XRP futures, and the SEC is preparing a framework for 24/7 trading of tokenized US stocks, the same tokenization rail Hougan cited via DTCC.

The industry’s political read matches Hougan’s agency thesis. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse blamed Democratic politics for the miss, while Ripple’s lawyer argued that XRP already has legal clarity and does not need a statute.

Atkins confirmed that Project Crypto will proceed even if CLARITY stalls. The regulatory direction of travel has not changed, only the vehicle.

Hougan is candid about what he gave up. Agency rules can be reversed by the next administration. That was exactly his January reason for wanting Clarity written into statute.

He has not abandoned the durability problem, he has deprioritized it. BTC’s 4% post-vote drop, $669 million in liquidations, and macro headwinds around rates and oil remain real speed bumps.

The destination, Hougan says, is unchanged. The next catalysts to watch are written SEC and CFTC rulemaking proposals, not another cloture count.

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