Dennis Porter and Frank Holmes on the Clarity Act: What Is Blocking It and What Bitcoiners Can Do Now
Dennis Porter, CEO and co-founder of Satoshi Action Fund, and Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of HIVE Digital Technologies, joined Simply Bitcoin on July 6 to walk through the current state of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act and make a direct call to action: write your lawmakers now, while there is still a window.
WHERE THE CLARITY ACT STANDS
The Clarity Act passed the House in July 2025. On May 14, 2026, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill 15-9, with two Democrats joining all Republicans on the panel. The bill was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar on June 1, 2026. But clearing the full Senate requires 60 votes, which means a substantial number of Democrats must cross the aisle. That threshold has not yet been secured, and the clock is tightening ahead of the November 2026 midterms.
Porter was direct about the stakes. If the Clarity Act does not pass in this Congress and Democrats retake the Senate, the bill likely dies for at least two years. He pointed specifically to the possibility of Senator Elizabeth Warren chairing the Banking Committee, describing her camp as unwilling to engage with crypto legislation at any meaningful level of seriousness.
THE TWO ISSUES HOLDING IT UP
Porter identified two primary sticking points. The first is the BRCA provision, Section 604, which would protect open-source developers from criminal liability when third parties use their code for illegal purposes. Law enforcement groups and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a former state attorney general, have pushed back hard on this language. Porter said DeFi interests carry significant influence in Washington and that the bill is unlikely to pass without something in it for them, but that the specific BRCA language still needs to land somewhere both sides can accept.
The second sticking point is ethics. Donald Trump's most recent financial disclosures showed his family earning more from crypto ventures than Coinbase generated in revenue over the same period. Democrats need to bring something back to their voters on this front before they can support the bill. Porter noted that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and a few other Democrats are negotiating in good faith on an ethics provision, and that the White House has said it would accept ethics language as long as it does not single out the Trump family specifically.
SENTIMENT AND CAPITAL MARKETS
Holmes brought a capital markets lens to the conversation. He has spent roughly four decades managing mutual funds and ETFs and pointed out that regulatory uncertainty feeds directly into quant sentiment factors that move large pools of leveraged capital. He cited prediction market data showing the probability of Clarity passing had dropped from around 70 percent to roughly 26 percent over the prior six weeks. That kind of sentiment shift, he argued, translates into real selling pressure on Bitcoin-adjacent assets through mechanical fund redemptions.
THE CALL TO ACTION
Porter's ask was specific. When an agreement on ethics and the BRCA language starts to take shape, Bitcoiners should not immediately attack it as a Democratic power play. Without an ethics provision, the bill cannot reach 60 votes. The goal is passage, not a perfect bill. A clear, short letter to a lawmaker expressing support for the Clarity Act and endorsing good-faith negotiations on both ethics and Section 604 is the most useful thing an individual can do right now.
Porter said Satoshi Action Fund has now helped grassroots advocates send over 300,000 letters to every lawmaker in the country, and that volume matters. Constituents can look up their representatives at any congressional lookup tool, find contact information, and send an email from their personal account. Showing up in person to a lawmaker's office, he said, is the single most impactful action available, with letters a close second.
THE BIPARTISAN REALITY
Both guests pushed back on the idea that Democrats are inherently anti-Bitcoin. Porter attributed the hostility of the prior administration to a specific deal Elizabeth Warren made with the Biden team that gave her influence over domestic financial policy, not to any structural Democratic opposition to Bitcoin itself. He pointed to 18 Senate Democrats and 70 House Democrats voting in favor of crypto legislation in the current Congress as evidence that the bipartisan base exists. The challenge is converting that base into 60 Senate votes on a single bill, under severe time pressure, in the most politically divided environment in modern American memory.
