Bitcoin Magazine

New Clarity Act Draft Would Bar Trump and Officials From Issuing Crypto, With a 2029 Sunset

Senate Republicans released an updated version of the Clarity Act on Wednesday, a draft that for the first time carries a crypto ethics agreement barring the president, vice president, members of Congress, federal judges, and other covered officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets.

The new Clarity Act text, posted after morning briefing calls with stakeholders, adds a section titled “Ban on certain digital asset transactions.” It states that a covered individual “shall not, in exchange for consideration,” issue or sponsor a digital asset, a prohibition that reaches public officials and employees during their service, and their spouses. 

A companion clause bars the listing of any digital asset found to be issued or sponsored by a covered individual in violation of the ban.

The bill offers a safe harbor. A covered individual would avoid violation by placing a direct interest in a digital asset in a qualified blind trust, divesting it, or both, along procedures that track the ethics-agreement rules under section 208 of title 18. 

A separate carve-out protects continued use of a covered individual’s name, image, or likeness when an issuer or intermediary used it before the person entered covered status.

JUST IN: Senate Republicans release updated Clarity Act text that bans the President and covered officials from issuing digital assets and requires them to sell their crypto holdings or put them in a blind trust. pic.twitter.com/v7UDXGI45B

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 22, 2026

The ethics package carries an expiration date. Under the draft, the provisions have no force after noon on January 20, 2029, and no person faces penalty after that sunset for conduct on or before it. The timing lines up with the end of the current presidential term.

Clarity Act dispute over President Trump’s crypto efforts

The ethics language answers a months-long Clarity Act dispute over President Trump’s crypto ventures, which a July financial disclosure tied to about $1.4 billion in 2025 income through the $TRUMP token and World Liberty Financial. 

Eleanor Terrett reported the package was negotiated between the White House and Republican Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno, and that it does not carry Democratic sign-off. 

Democrats on the Banking Committee had pressed for enforceable conflict-of-interest rules, and an amendment to bar officials from crypto ties failed during the May markup of the Clarity Act.

Beyond ethics, industry sources say the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act stays intact from the committee version. The BRCA holds that non-custodial developers and infrastructure providers are not money transmitters for building or maintaining decentralized networks, a protection the industry has pushed to preserve. 

Further amendment details

The Lummis-Grassley amendment keeps criminal liability for anyone who “knowingly” facilitates illicit transactions, and the Keep Your Coins Act preserves the right to self-custody.

The stablecoin-yield section holds the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise: a ban on interest paid on idle payment-stablecoin balances, with room for rewards tied to activity such as transactions or staking, as long as those rewards do not function as interest on a bank deposit.

A new section of the Clarity Act builds out law enforcement tools. It raises funding for state and local crypto investigations and blockchain analytics, sets up training for police and prosecutors, creates a “cyber center” against nation-state actors such as North Korea and Iran, and forms a public-private task force on fraud. 

It also requires stablecoin issuers to comply with lawful orders to freeze, seize, burn, and reissue tokens.

The text carries bankruptcy protections that treat customer digital assets as property of the customer rather than part of a failed company’s estate, a rule meant to head off another FTX-style loss.

The 616-page draft came from Republicans, and it lacks Democratic support for the moment. 

Senator Lummis thanked her “Democratic colleagues for their important contributions” and voiced a commitment to “reaching a deal in the coming days that will allow this legislation to become law.” Majority Leader John Thune plans a floor vote in the coming weeks.

The release caps a stretch of pressure to move the Clarity Act. The House passed its version in July 2025 on a 294-134 vote, and the measure has waited in the Senate since. 

The Senate Banking Committee advanced its text in a 15-9 vote in May. Coinbase and other firms have pushed for passage before the August recess, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put the effort at the “1-yard line,” and Trump has pressed the chamber to act.

This post New Clarity Act Draft Would Bar Trump and Officials From Issuing Crypto, With a 2029 Sunset first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Winklevoss Twins Donated $10 Million From Bitcoin Sale to Trump Super PAC

Crypto entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated over $10 million after liquidating Bitcoin to American super PAC MAGA Inc., which supports President Donald Trump. 

A Tuesday filing shows each twin — the founders of the public crypto exchange, Gemini — donated over $5 million each. 

The donation comes about one month after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission asked a judge to vacate the agency’s $5 million penalty against Gemini.

The twins back in 2024 announced that they had donated 30.94 Bitcoin, valued at over $2 million at the time, to President Trump’s campaign, claiming it would “put an end to the Biden Administration’s war on crypto.” 

During the Biden Administration, regulators cracked down hard on crypto exchanges — including Gemini — but since President Trump took office, a number of lawsuits have been scrapped. 

MAGA Inc. has raised over $400 million in fresh cash ahead of November’s midterm elections. 

The Winklevoss twins are Bitcoin OGs

The Winklevoss Twins — who claimed they played a part in the creation of Facebook — founded crypto exchange Gemini in 2014 after being early Bitcoin backers.

Crypto industry observers have long speculated that the twins are two of the biggest Bitcoin holders in the space. 

The twins have long praised President Trump’s pro-Bitcoin and pro-business stance, claiming it’s crucial for the future of the crypto industry in the country. 

Tyler in particular emphasized the need for a political shift to prevent further harm to the industry and to restore an environment conducive to innovation and economic growth.

“President Donald J. Trump is the pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, and pro-business choice,” he said back in 2024. “This is not even remotely open for debate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is severely misinformed, delusional, or not telling the truth.”

Back in May, Gemini shares jumped over 20% in after-hours trading after the Winklevoss twins announced a $100 million Bitcoin-funded investment in the company alongside Q1 earnings showing 42% year-over-year revenue growth. 

The quarter’s results included a narrowed net loss of $109 million and a sharp rise in services and credit card revenue, though trading volumes had fallen from a year earlier following Bitcoin’s crash from its October peak. 

The rally followed months of turmoil for Gemini, including layoffs, executive departures, shareholder lawsuits, and a stock price that had dropped more than 89% from its IPO high, partly offset by a CFTC derivatives license granted in April.

This post Winklevoss Twins Donated $10 Million From Bitcoin Sale to Trump Super PAC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on almost nothing. But they do agree that the public should own a piece of the AI industry.

The Vermont senator and the president disagree on both the structure and stake of public ownership, but the idea is being discussed at the highest levels of government. Even OpenAI and Anthropic back versions of the idea, though Anthropic’s is a tax rather than a stake. Let’s tune in.

The table below summarizes preliminary proposals and shows how far apart they stand, from a voluntary sliver to an outright seizure. After taking a stake in Intel, the president said he wanted “many more cases like it.” Treasury paid $8.9 billion for 9.9% of Intel in August 2025; by the following spring the stake was worth roughly $36 billion, increasing the appetite for such deals. The Pentagon has already taken 15% of a rare-earth miner. This is a pattern, not a one-off.

The argument for these proposals is a public-finance argument, and a strong one. The science under AI grew out of decades of federally funded research. The training data came from the writing, code, and art of millions of people who were never asked and never paid.

Sanders puts the principle plainly: “When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth.”

The cleanest versions cost the taxpayer nothing up front, because the equity is contributed rather than bought. That is not the Intel model, which Washington bought for cash; it is the AI version now on the table, where the shares would be donated. If the bubble bursts, the public is out nothing. If it holds, the public owns a slice. A bet with no ante is a rare thing in public finance.

Source	Stake	Structure
Bernie Sanders	Roughly 50% government position (reported figures vary)	Federal sovereign wealth fund; government holds voting shares; ~$1,000-per-person dividend
Trump administration	Case-by-case equity stakes; 9.9% of Intel (now ~$36B)	Direct federal ownership; framed as a taxpayer “windfall”
OpenAI	~5% of equity (~$42.6B) contributed voluntarily	“Public Wealth Fund” modeled on Alaska’s; returns distributed to citizens
Anthropic	No equity	Taxes on AI firms to fund worker support, possibly UBI

Proposals as of July 2026; talks remain preliminary and any federal version would require an act of Congress.

There’s a real danger, though, in what the government becomes when it owns a piece of the industry it is supposed to regulate. A public stake in AI can be a dividend or a trap, and the whole difference lives in the fine print.

Three things separate the dividend from the trap. The first is the size of the stake. The second is a wall between the government as owner and the government as referee, so the hand that banks the dividend never writes the safety rules. The third is a fence around the money: proceeds earmarked for the workers the technology displaces, not swept into the general fund. None of the three enforces itself.

Here’s a loose historical precedent. In 1998, 46 states settled with the tobacco industry for about $206 billion, paid out over 25 years. The states came to lean on the yearly checks, which quietly made them partners in the survival of the product they were supposed to fight. And the money drifted: today states spend only about three cents of every tobacco dollar on the anti-smoking programs the settlement was meant to fund.

A stake with no end date makes the government a permanent co-owner of the industry it regulates, and permanence is one thing that turned a tobacco settlement into a tobacco dependency. The answer is a fixed end date. The same law that creates the stake should set the year it must end. This is known as a sunset clause.

If Uncle Sam owns a stake, he should collect the dividend through the buildout years, then sell it down on a fixed, published schedule until the position is gone. Ten or 15 years. Economists can pick the number. The deadline should be set in law from the start, so a future Congress cannot quietly extend it.

Temporary co-ownership lets the public bank the upside of the boom without leaving the referee holding shares in the game for good. Sanders and Trump, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, have seized on a real grievance and reached for the permanent version of the remedy, which is the version most likely to curdle. Of course, sunset clauses are not etched in stone either.

Another challenge is that the moment Washington owns pieces of its AI champions, other capitals follow — Beijing, Brussels, the Gulf — each taking a stake in its own, and the claim that American platforms answer to no government gets harder to make. A vendor with the state on its cap table is not a neutral one. No wall and no expiration date solves this problem.

A stake also puts the government in the business of picking winners. Own a piece of OpenAI or Anthropic and Washington acquires a financial interest in their business, and a reason to favor them when it writes the next rule or signs the next contract. The startup is forced to compete against incumbents favored by the feds. And in the fast-moving AI field, the players change rapidly.

AI’s economic challenges are real and the grievance underneath these proposals is legitimate, but government ownership is the wrong remedy. The conflict of interest is real, the precedents are bad, and it’s hard to imagine that a referee with money on the game will be neutral.

Still, the momentum is real, too. Sanders, Trump, and the labs are all pushing versions of the same idea, and one of them may pass. If it does, the temporary version with guardrails beats the permanent one: price it honestly, wall it off, aim the money at the damage, give it a hard end date. None of that is a reason to take the stake. It is only what keeps a bad idea from calcifying into a worse one.

Bitcoin Magazine

‘Don’t Let China Win’: President Trump Presses Senate on Clarity Act in Final Stretch

The Senate returns to Washington on July 13, with the clock running down on the most consequential piece of crypto legislation in years. Lawmakers now have roughly four weeks to schedule, debate, and pass the CLARITY Act before the August recess. 

President Trump weighed in directly on Monday, posting on Truth Social that “in honor of Senator Lindsey Graham, a big supporter, the U.S. Senate should pass the Clarity Act” and warning that China and other countries “would like to take complete and total control of this major financial ‘happening,'” as well as A.I. 

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt amplified the urgency, noting the critical week coincides with the one-year anniversary of the GENIUS Act and cautioning, “We cannot afford to delay any longer.”

This is a window many policy watchers see as the last realistic chance to enact comprehensive digital-asset market structure legislation this Congress.

The CLARITY Act would draw a firm regulatory line between the SEC and the CFTC, granting the commodities regulator exclusive jurisdiction over spot markets for “digital commodities” while leaving the SEC to oversee investment-contract assets. 

It cleared the House in July 2025 by a bipartisan 294–134 vote and advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee in May by a 15-9 margin, with two Democrats joining all Republicans. 

Those committee votes, however, came with warnings that floor support was not guaranteed.

This week’s milestone is the release of updated text merging the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committee versions, the clearest signal yet of what survived negotiations and what remains unsettled. 

JUST IN: President Trump says "The U.S. Senate should pass the Clarity Act." pic.twitter.com/9Y7VxKZ3ck

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 13, 2026

Clarity Act issues remain 

The bill missed the July 4 signing ceremony that White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt had targeted, and while meetings ran through the recess, the thorniest issues remain unresolved, according to Crypto in America. Getting to 60 votes may prove harder than getting this far, and with the Republican conference shrinking, Democratic buy-in matters more than ever.

Chief among them is the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, folded into the CLARITY Act as Section 604, which would shield non-custodial software developers from being treated as money transmitters. 

Law enforcement groups argue the language, as written, would hamper investigations into on-chain crime, and Democratic support may hinge on revisions.

An ethics standoff

The more explosive fight is over ethics. Negotiators have yet to reach a CLARITY Act deal with the White House on guardrails around conflicts of interest tied to President Trump’s crypto ventures, after disclosures showed he earned more than $1 billion from crypto-related businesses last year. 

House members have pressed the Senate to act while addressing those concerns, and a coalition of more than 200 companies has urged leadership to bring the bill to the floor. The coalition argued that the bill would establish a clear federal framework for digital assets and help keep innovation in the U.S.

Complicating the math, the death of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and the continued absence of Mitch McConnell (R-KY) leave Republicans with almost no room for error in reaching 60 votes.

Sentiment is split. Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith says momentum is building and a floor vote before recess remains achievable, echoing CFTC leadership calling the bill “so close.” 

Others are wary: Galaxy Digital cut its passage odds to 50-50, citing the shrinking calendar and competing priorities like the NDAA. The firm said the legislation still faces procedural hurdles, unresolved ethics and developer-protection disputes, and a crowded Senate agenda that could delay consideration until September. Galaxy said the odds would improve if Senate leaders commit to a July vote. Odds were as high as 70% earlier this year.

The next four weeks may be CLARITY’s last chance in the 119th Congress.

This post ‘Don’t Let China Win’: President Trump Presses Senate on Clarity Act in Final Stretch first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

U.S. Bitcoin Reserve Stalls as Treasury and Commerce Vie for Control: Report

Sixteen months after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to build a federal bitcoin reserve, the White House says it is still working out how the fund should be structured, and a dispute between two departments has slowed the effort, according to recent reporting from Bloomberg.

Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 to create what he called a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, along with a separate U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile for other cryptocurrencies. 

The order directed the Treasury and Commerce departments to develop budget-neutral methods for acquiring bitcoin, ones that would not draw on taxpayer money. 

The reserve was to be funded in large part with bitcoin the government already holds through criminal and civil forfeitures.

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve obstacles

According to Bloomberg, the plan has run into two obstacles. Treasury and Commerce are each making a case to run the reserve, and questions have arisen over whether Treasury has the legal authority to manage the holdings. 

People familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak in public, said housing the reserve inside the Commerce Department is one option under review.

The Justice Department said its Office of Legal Counsel “is working closely with both the Treasury and Commerce departments to determine legally available options to accomplish the president’s policy.” 

A further concern is whether the government can hold bitcoin for an indefinite period, as the order intended, given the currency’s price swings.

“President Trump campaigned on a vision of cementing America as the global capital of cryptocurrency and other cutting-edge technologies,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement. “To deliver on the president’s vision, the Trump administration continues to evaluate the best structure for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.”

The administration’s chief crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said in April that he expected a major announcement within weeks. That announcement has not come.

Officials have said a presidential order alone cannot complete the project. The order does not carry the force of law, and Congress has not passed legislation to authorize the reserve. 

Yesterday, while speaking on the newly introduced Trump Accounts, President Trump said bitcoin could eventually be added to the accounts, saying “something could happen” when asked about the asset. Trump also said he’s “a big fan of crypto.” 

BREAKING: President Trump says "a lot of people" are using Bitcoin

"I don't think anybody realizes how powerful (it is)" pic.twitter.com/CkVrvHUE3q

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 6, 2026

New Bitcoin legislation introduced

A bill from Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, would codify the order and set a target of acquiring 1 million bitcoin over five years through budget-neutral strategies. No such measure has advanced. If Republicans lose their House majority in this year’s midterm elections, the prospect of passage could dim.

The government’s bitcoin position ranks among the largest in the world. Estimates put it above 300,000 coins, worth more than $20 billion at current prices, according to Arkham Intelligence. The White House has said premature sales of seized bitcoin cost taxpayers about $17 billion over the years, and that a single reserve holding the asset for the long term would give the country a strategic advantage.

Timing has also worked against the plan as an investment. Bitcoin reached a record in October, a rally the administration tied in part to enthusiasm about Trump, then fell close to 50% from that peak. When Trump first called for the reserve, bitcoin traded near $93,000; it now sits above $64,000, a drop of about a third.

While the structure remains unresolved, Trump has built a personal bitcoin position of more than $50 million, according to his recent financial disclosure. 

The reserve, described by the administration as strategic, differs from a conventional strategic reserve because it is meant to be held for the long term rather than tapped during market emergencies.

This post U.S. Bitcoin Reserve Stalls as Treasury and Commerce Vie for Control: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

President Donald Trump Discloses More Than $50 Million in Bitcoin Held in Cold Storage

President Donald Trump holds more than $50 million in Bitcoin, stored in cold wallets, according to his 2025 annual financial disclosure released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The filing is a detailed federal accounting of the president’s personal crypto position since he took office in January 2025.

In total, Trump reported generating more than $1 billion in crypto-related revenue last year, including $635 million in royalties from his memecoin venture and more than $500 million from token sales associated with World Liberty Financial.

The headline figure of over $50 million sits in a single line of the report. Under the entity CIC Digital LLC, an asset described as a “Cryptocurrency Wallet Virtual Bitcoin Key (held in cold wallet)” carries a valuation of “Over $50,000,000,” the highest bracket the disclosure form permits. 

BREAKING: President Donald Trump reports owning over $50 million in Bitcoin, held in cold storage. pic.twitter.com/7QZUbnEvJI

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) June 30, 2026

The form does not require a precise number above that threshold, so the true size of the holding could exceed the stated floor. The Bitcoin line reported no income for the period, a result consistent with an asset held rather than sold.

The Bitcoin sits inside The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, dated April 7, 2014, of which the president is the sole beneficiary. That structure places the holding within the same trust that controls his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social. 

The cold-storage designation indicates the private keys are kept offline, a method that removes the asset from internet-connected systems and the custody of a third-party exchange.

Bitcoin is one of several digital assets in the cold wallets tied to CIC Digital LLC. The same entity reports an Ethereum key valued between $5 million and $25 million, a staked Ethereum position through a Coinbase staking agreement that produced $510,808 in validator rewards, a USDC stablecoin holding in the $5 million to $25 million range, and a smaller dollar-denominated wallet. 

Across the two largest asset classes, Bitcoin and Ethereum, the disclosed value runs past $100 million.

Separate disclosures also report that Vice President JD Vance holds Bitcoin valued between $250,000 and $500,000. Vance’s holdings have been previously reported. 

JUST IN: Vice President JD Vance discloses owning $250,001 to $500,000 in Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/EHmtkwQc1f

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) June 30, 2026

Trump and World Liberty Financial’s holdings

A second cluster of crypto holdings appears under entities connected to World Liberty Financial, the decentralized-finance venture that carries the Trump name. 

Those wallets include a separate Bitcoin key valued at “Over $50,000,000,” an Ethereum key in the same top bracket, and positions in other crypto. The World Liberty entries also record large income figures tied to token sales, including more than $236 million in net proceeds distributed by World Liberty Financial LLC and a $150 million income figure on the Ethereum line. 

Trump’s disclosure reports more than $500 million in proceeds from token sales tied to World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked venture behind the WLFI governance token, with the company’s combined wallet entries summing to roughly $527 million. 

The filing also records a $635,068,835 royalty payment under CIC Digital LLC, linked to a meme-coin licensing agreement with Celebration Coins. A related entity, DTTM Operations LLC, lists 15.75 billion World Liberty governance tokens valued in the top bracket.

The disclosure arrives at a moment when the president’s crypto interests intersect with his administration’s policy agenda. Trump has called himself somewhat of an ally of the digital-asset industry, and his government has moved to establish a federal posture toward reserves and regulation. 

The personal holdings detailed in the filing give the public a direct view of the scale of the assets the president owns in the sector his administration oversees.

A sitting U.S. president now reports holding more than $50 million of Bitcoin in self-custody, in cold storage, in the same manner long advocated by Bitcoin holders who prize control of their own keys. 

What the filing does not reveal is when the Bitcoin was acquired, at what price, or how the holding has changed across the year. The form’s bracket system caps reporting at the $50 million ceiling and offers no window into cost basis or timing. 

It’s important to note that the $635 million royalty figure appears as a single line in the filing (recorded under CIC Digital as a license agreement with Celebration Coins, which the document does not explicitly label a “memecoin”), the “more than $500 million” from World Liberty Financial and the “$1 billion” total are aggregations compiled by Bitcoin Magazine. 

The filing’s single stated token-sales line is $236.25 million, and larger figures were found by summing multiple separate crypto-wallet entries. It’s also worth flagging that several of these amounts are described as gross “proceeds from token sales distributed by World Liberty Financial LLC,” so they don’t necessarily represent net income to Trump himself.

This post President Donald Trump Discloses More Than $50 Million in Bitcoin Held in Cold Storage first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.