Crypto Market Update: Senate Blocks CLARITY Act in Close Vote

Bitcoin price update

Bitcoin (BTC) was priced at US$76,001.56, trading 1.9 percent lower over the past 24 hours.

Bitcoin dipped during the CLARITY Act vote before steadying.

Glassnode called that performance resilient given the headline risks, putting US$76,700 as the level where buyers are currently stepping in the most. The firm points to US$71,300 and US$62,000 to US$65,000 as deeper levels of support, and US$80,500 and US$83,000 to US$86,000 as levels where sellers are likely to cap gains.

However, Glassnode notes that “resilient” isn't the same as “strong."

Buying demand had already been drying up before the vote, with Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows turning negative after 27 straight days of gains. Corporate treasury buying is down to a fraction of last year’s pace, and options traders are now leaning toward expecting further declines rather than a rebound.

Cryptocurrency prices continued dropping ahead of the US Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point, lifting the target range to 3.75 to 4 percent.

Bitcoin price chart

Ether and altcoin price update

• Ethereum (ETH) was priced at US$2,405.96, trading 2 percent lower over the last 24 hours.

• XRP (XRP) was priced at US$1.30, down 9.2 percent over the past 24 hours.

• Solana (SOL) was trading at US$98.13, trading 2.6 percent higher over the past 24 hours.

Today's crypto news to know

Read on for a round-up of the biggest crypto market news:

• Senate blocks landmark CLARITY Act in close vote
• Crypto industry reacts to CLARITY Act vote
• Bitget Wallet adds tokenized stock access via Reality
• BUZZ HPC partners with ProCogia
• Crypto exchange CoinEx announces closure after nine years
• Circle launches Arc Layer 1 Blockchain

Senate blocks landmark CLARITY Act in close vote

The US Senate blocked the CLARITY Act from advancing on Tuesday (September 15) as the procedural cloture motion failed in a 50 to 49 vote, falling short of the 60 votes required to clear the procedural hurdle.

Three Republicans — Senators Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran — joined Democrats in voting against the motion to proceed. Senator Thom Tillis also voted against cloture, a procedural move that let him immediately file a motion to reconsider, since only senators on the prevailing side can do so.

Key Democratic negotiator Senator Ruben Gallego charged that Republicans care “more about making sure the president keeps making money than actually bringing regulations” and consequently are “failing the whole system.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren also slammed the final draft's ethics rules, calling them “a weak fig leaf that will do nothing to stop him from making his next $1.4 billion in crypto profits.”

Despite the defeat, Senator Thom Tillis said in a Facebook post that there is still a future for the landmark regulation: “This is not the end for the Clarity Act. We've made substantial bipartisan progress in large part because of the White House. This procedural motion allows us to continue working towards a positive outcome.”

The legislative failure immediately triggered market selloffs, pushing Bitcoin below US$76,000.

US Securities and Exchange (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins promised that regulators will continue modernizing digital asset rules, declaring at a Washington summit that “with or without that legislation, this Administration will deliver for American investors and technological innovators.”

Crypto industry reacts to CLARITY Act vote

The failed vote didn't rattle an industry that's largely stopped waiting on Congress.

Anchorage Digital's head of policy, Kevin Wysocki, made that plain hours before the vote even closed:

"Clarity would be really nice to have. It's the big, beautiful present with a bow on top of it. But there's a lot of stocking stuffers that are out there too,” he wrote in an emailed statement, pointing to Office of the Comptroller of the Currency guidance and charter pathways that companies are already building under.

Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, a former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), put the same point in historical terms: FIT21 passed the House in 2024 and died in the Senate without ever coming back, and the cryptocurrency industry kept moving regardless.

Where the reaction gets more pointed is on what, specifically, still doesn't work without a law. In an email, Trace Finance CEO Bernardo Brites said the failure leaves stablecoin issuers stuck— rules built under the GENIUS Act remain "disconnected" from anything resolving how the SEC and CFTC actually split jurisdiction.

Theorem founder Vladimir Tikhomirov raised a narrower but sharper gap for tokenized real-world assets specifically, explaining that there's still no "regulatory blueprint for how these assets can be traded, how liquidity is formed around them, and how investors can actually exit their positions." In his view, that means tokenization can keep growing while the market for trading tokenized assets stays underbuilt.

Moon Pursuit Capital's Courtney Olujobi argued that for investors the cost isn't the vote itself — it's what uncertainty does to a company's decisions years before any legal bill arrives. For example, whether an early hire is an engineer or a compliance lawyer, or whether a token launches to US users first.

"You can't build an investment thesis on a bill," she said.

For his part, XYO co-founder Markus Levin tied that same uncertainty to Wednesday's price action, noting that Bitcoin has absorbed the setback better than altcoins and crypto equities because the SEC and CFTC have already been clarifying pieces of the framework on their own — meaning the real cost isn't whether crypto gets regulated, but how long companies keep paying a "regulatory discount" while it isn't.

Of course, not everyone is betting on a quick second act.

"We may see any further progress on the CLARITY Act delayed through much of 2027,” said TransFi CEO Raj Kamal.

Bitget Wallet adds tokenized stock access via Reality

Bitget Wallet has integrated Reality, a tokenized asset issuance protocol, giving its self-custodial wallet users access to more than 1,700 tokenized versions of US stocks and ETFS, including companies like NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).

The tokens, called rTokens, cover roughly 600 underlying securities and are backed 1:1 by real shares held at Alpaca Securities, a FINRA-registered broker-dealer that is a Securities Investor Protection Corporation member.

Reserves are attested daily by a third-party accounting firm, according to a joint press release.

Reality joins two other tokenization providers, Ondo and xStocks, that are already available on the wallet. The integration is initially live on the Arbitrum and Morph networks.

Dividends on the tokenized shares are paid to users' wallets in stablecoins, and the tokens can reportedly be used as collateral in other DeFi protocols. Bitget said tokenized asset trading volume on its wallet grew 27 percent quarter-on-quarter in the second quarter of this year and cited a user base of 100 million.

The expansion comes as the SEC continues refining its stance on tokenized securities, having issued guidance in January distinguishing real, custody-backed tokens like these from so-called synthetic equity products facing tighter scrutiny.

BUZZ HPC partners with ProCogia

BUZZ High Performance Computing (BUZZ HPC), a subsidiary of HIVE Digital Technologies (TSXV:HIVE,NASDAQ:HIVE), announced a strategic partnership with ProCogia on Tuesday.

Under the agreement, ProCogia, an applied artificial intelligence (AI) and data engineering firm, will procure dedicated GPU capacity from BUZZ HPC's Canadian data centers to power enterprise workloads across Canada, the US and Europe. In turn, ProCogia will act as a preferred applied AI services partner for BUZZ HPC clients, offering specialized LLM development, custom model training, agentic systems and environment integration.

The collaboration will also serve as the primary cloud launchpad for ProCogia's proprietary ZeroBoxx AI framework. Additionally, ProCogia's vertical AI products, including healthcare voice AI solution CallYeah and code migration LLM PolyKode, will run directly on BUZZ HPC infrastructure as the two companies co-sell Canadian sovereign compute and applied AI solutions to international enterprise and public sector clients.

Crypto exchange CoinEx announces closure after nine years

Crypto exchange CoinEx announced on Tuesday that it will shut down operations on December 22, 2026.

Founder and CEO Haipo Yang blamed the exit on market weakness and mounting regulatory demands, writing on X that “the security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain.”

Yang rejected potential sale offers, choosing instead to deliver a “clean ending” for platform staff, users and token holders. The exchange immediately stopped new user registrations and shifted futures trading into reduce-only mode.

CoinEx will terminate non-spot services on September 22, end spot trading on September 29 and as mentioned will close withdrawals permanently on December 22 of this year.

Circle launches Arc Layer 1 Blockchain

Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group (NYSE:CRCL) launched its public mainnet for Arc, an open Layer 1 blockchain that was purpose built for financial markets and real-time money movement.

CEO Jeremy Allaire described Arc as “the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself,” framing the network as an open economic operating system for the internet. The blockchain requires users to pay transaction fees directly in USDC, eliminating the need for a volatile native network token.

Major global financial institutions, including BlackRock (NYSE:BLK), Mastercard (NYSE:MA) and Visa (NYSE:V), joined Arc as founding network validators. Circle integrated its payments network and Circle StableFX directly into Arc to enable 24/7 cross-currency settlement across multiple fiat-backed stablecoins.