The US Senate is leaving for its summer break without voting on the Clarity Act, pushing the bill into the fall. John Thune confirmed the chamber will pick it up when lawmakers return on September 14. XRP is taking the hit harder than the rest of the market, down 2% on the day and 5.5% across seven days.
Key Takeaways
- The Clarity Act vote slips to September, with the Senate back on the 14th
- XRP trades at $1.03 and sheds 5.5% over seven days, worse than BTC and ETH
- The bill needs 60 votes, and Democrats will not open the door before the midterms
Thune Pushes the File to September 14
Senate Majority Leader John Thune ended the guessing game late in the week. The Clarity Act will not reach the floor before the summer recess, which starts Friday and runs for a month. He promised to queue it up first thing once the chamber reconvenes in mid-September.
The stall was not a last-minute accident. Thune pointed to Democrats refusing a time agreement, the procedural tool that would have compressed floor business and opened a path to a vote. The ethics question, built around Donald Trump’s crypto holdings, has weighed on the text since the White House hosted senators to defuse that exact issue.
Arithmetic remains the real obstacle. The bill needs 60 votes to advance, which makes Democratic support mandatory. Several Republicans have also aired reservations in public, thinning the starting base even further.
Thune noted he is working with the bill’s sponsors, including Senator Cynthia Lummis, to rebuild a majority during the break. The friction points have been known for months: stablecoin rewards, banking sector hostility, and the illicit finance provisions that worry law enforcement. None of those three has moved ahead of the recess.
XRP Pays a Steeper Price Than the Majors
The price reaction was uneven, and that is what makes the session worth reading. XRP changes hands at $1.03 after giving up 2% on the day, with the seven-day drop reaching 5.5%. It is the token whose valuation leans hardest on a clean legal classification for digital assets in the US.
The two largest caps barely moved. Bitcoin sits at $64,365.16 after a 0.59% dip and prints a flat week. Ether holds $1,904.37, down 0.14% on the day and marginally lower over seven days. The gap with XRP reads as a regulatory risk premium rather than a broad market move. The Senate had already shelved the text in late July without producing a comparable slide.
The rest of the basket follows the same dispersion logic. Solana slips to $72.92, down 1.19% and close to 2% lower on the week. Dogecoin drops back under 7 cents with a roughly 1% loss. BNB moves the other way, up 1% across seven days at $591, while HYPE gains 1.3% to approach $56.
Institutional flows tell a different story from spot prices. US spot bitcoin funds pulled in roughly $626 million between August 3 and August 5 while the price went nowhere. Bitcoin keeps support between $63,000 and $64,000 and resistance between $66,000 and $66,600. That same setup was in place when XRP printed its death cross in mid-July.
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What the September Window Actually Changes
The delay moves the vote into a far less friendly window. By mid-September the midterms will be weeks away, and Democrats will have even less incentive to hand over a legislative win on a file where crypto money has become a campaign talking point.
Industry groups answered in a measured register. Cody Carbone, who runs the Digital Chamber, admitted the disappointment while stressing that the lobbying effort continues. Ji Hun Kim, of the Crypto Council for Innovation, reached for the same word to describe how the week ended.
For holders, the calendar matters as much as the text. Every delay extends the stretch where US issuers operate without knowing which agency will supervise them, the SEC or the CFTC. That uncertainty already pushed the SEC to draft its own framework, a project it started with the Reg Crypto rule floated in July, running in parallel to Congress.
The real risk for the sector is not defeat but drift. A bill that spans two sessions loses its sponsors, its compromises and its political urgency. Time is working against the text, and the September window will be narrow between the federal budget and the campaign trail.
Whether XRP closes its gap to BTC before lawmakers return is the open question. The token has spent the past year reacting fast to Washington headlines in both directions. An actual floor vote in mid-September would put legal classification back at the center of the flows overnight.
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