CLARITY Next Steps🔥Kristen Smith INTERVIEW🚨Solana Policy Institute

All right, let's dive into clarity today because there's a lot happening now that it has moved out of the banking committee. And we're going to break all that down for you. We have a special guest coming over from the Solana Policy Institute. Let's just get started. I do want to thank our sponsor today. And that is Tangem. If you guys are looking at self-custy, and you probably

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Hey, listen, we're gonna bring in Kristen Smith, who is the president at the Solana Policy Institute today. How are you, Kristen?

Good morning, Paul. Great to be here and very excited about the developments this week. Listen, it was a big week yesterday,

pretty much a rapid fire of amendments. And then of course those amendments pretty much were, I don't know if they were shot down but they were somewhat ignored coming out of the Senate.

And maybe there were some deals that were made to kind of get into that. Just to kind of get people going, I'll give you guys a few things.

This was a few interesting developments and reactions from yesterday. This was a man to Fisher. She was talking about the issue around,

I just don't get it, the industry spent years saying crypto didn't fall within the SEC's jurisdiction. Now we're seeing this kind of spin. You look at that, you also look at the ABA,

which of course moved directly into doubling down on statements around what to do in terms of advancing the Clarity Act. And of course it all centers around that right there, which is stable coin yield guys.

So you guys know this generating rewards is the sticking point for the ABA. So it's going to be a big one. What do you consider as bipartisan right now, Kristen? Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, I think as a technical measure, anytime you have a legislation where there are either co-sponsors or votes where you have at least one senator from both sides of the aisle, that is technically considered bipartisan. But the real threshold here with the clarity act is we need 60 votes to get it out of the Senate. And there are

53 Republicans, 45 Democrats and two independents. And so, you know, depending on if all the Republicans vote or not, you know, you're going to need at least another seven. And so I think, you know, as, you know, we look at this legislation, we want it to be bipartisan because it has to be bipartisan. But also the bills that are bipartisan tend to have

more staying power. They aren't revisited anytime soon. Like they're really like the best negotiated deals because you have inputs from all sides of the kind of the political spectrum. And so, you know, our hope is that, you know, I think, listen, going into the markup yesterday, there was a lot of nervousness around whether or not we would have Democrats join the Republicans.

It was clear we had all the Republican votes, but it was a question of whether or not we would get the additional Democratic senators to join. That did happen, and that means that this bill has a much, much greater chance of getting floor time on the Senate floor. If it had been just straight partisan line, it might not have had the momentum needed to finish the process. So,

So I'm incredibly pleased that Senators Gallego and Senators Alsobrook joined with the Republicans to get this bill out of committee into the next phase because if that had not happened this week, it would have been very, very difficult. It starts to get very difficult to have enough time to complete the process before the

end of the year. So very excited that we reached this critical milestone. Well, we're going to talk about timing here because this is going to get very, I think very dire if we don't get things moving quickly.

You mentioned Gallego and also Brooks, others that were concerned about obviously Masto is in the hunt in terms of being able to turn into a yes vote. But with Gallego and also Brooks, they did have a statement yesterday that kind of gave them an out.

Yes, they were voting to get this through the committee, but it did kind of position it. Do you think they'll end up rug pulling us? I feel like there's something they're playing here.

No, I certainly hope they don't rug poll us. Obviously each vote is an independent vote and senators, it's their prerogative to vote how they want. But I think that there's been a lot of time and effort,

both in the House, with the Senate, with the White House, that has gone into this bill. And I think that, you know, people start to, they have skin in the game.

They've spent hours and hours and hours negotiating this. And so it is my hope that, you know, they don't, they don't rug pull.

Listen, like we do this all the time, right? At Solana Policy Institute, when I was at the Blockchain Association, you want to preserve your optionality

to continue to negotiate. And so oftentimes support at one stage, you know, doesn't necessarily mean support all the way through the process.

So, so no, I, but listen, I think that these senators, you know, I wasn't in the room, but my colleagues were in the room. We sort of divided and conquered yesterday

And the thing that I don't think was apparent from viewing it versus being in the room is that negotiations were happening on this bill up to the very last minute. I think both the Republicans and the Democrats

knew that if we wanted to keep this bill moving forward, like there had to be some bipartisan support coming out of committee. And so there was a tremendous amount of activity

in the room. I think the fact that there was this recognition that it needed to be bipartisan to increase its chances was good.