The Clock Is Running on American Crypto Leadership
Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, is making a direct appeal to Congress: pass the CLARITY Act before the window closes.
Writing in Fortune, Scaramucci calls the legislation 'the most important piece of financial market legislation Congress has considered in years.' His argument is straightforward — clear rules are the precondition for capital formation, entrepreneurship and consumer protection. Without them, the United States is not standing still. It is falling behind.
'Every day Congress delays, it sends another signal that America is comfortable exporting the next generation of financial innovation along with the jobs and economic growth that come with it,' Scaramucci writes.
From Lawsuits to Legislation
The core problem the CLARITY Act addresses is one the market has lived with for the better part of a decade: a regulatory framework defined, in Scaramucci's words, 'more by lawsuits than legislation.' Entrepreneurs building on-chain financial infrastructure have had no stable legal footing. Institutions willing to deploy capital have had no clear rules to price the regulatory risk. The result is predictable — investment decisions are increasingly being made outside the United States.
Scaramucci is no uncritical cheerleader for the current administration. He describes himself as 'one of Donald Trump's most outspoken critics' since his brief White House tenure, and he states plainly that elected officials and their families should not be issuing cryptocurrencies, promoting meme coins or 'creating even the appearance of profiting from public office.'
That candor gives his next point more weight: the ethics provisions Democrats demanded were negotiated in good faith, and Republicans and the White House accepted terms that, in his telling, 'would have been unthinkable only months ago.'
The New Obstacle
The sticking point has shifted. The debate is no longer about whether the CLARITY Act contains adequate ethics guardrails. It is now about whether the bill should also serve as the vehicle for a wholesale rewrite of federal ethics law.
Scaramucci draws a sharp line. 'Those are two different conversations,' he writes. If Congress believes federal ethics laws need strengthening — tighter conflict-of-interest rules, improved disclosure requirements, revised insider trading statutes — it should pursue that agenda on its own track, applied consistently across stocks, real estate, private businesses and digital assets alike.
Holding the market-structure bill hostage to that broader project, he argues, is not principled legislating. It is letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.
The Stakes
Scaramucci closes with a competitive framing that should resonate on both sides of the aisle: 'Businesses make decisions every day about where to invest, where to hire and where to launch new products. Increasingly, those decisions are being made outside the United States.'
The numbers come first, and the number that matters here is the opportunity cost of inaction. The CLARITY Act, whatever its imperfections, represents a serious bipartisan attempt to replace regulatory uncertainty with a durable legal framework — one that keeps the next generation of financial infrastructure under American law rather than ceding that ground to foreign jurisdictions.
Free enterprise does not wait for Washington to resolve every open question before deploying capital. If Congress cannot deliver clear rules on a bipartisan basis when the bill is already on the table, it will not be the entrepreneurs who pay the price. It will be the American workers and investors who never see those jobs and returns materialize here at home.
