06-15-2026 
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President Donald Trump’s crypto ‘ethics’ issues continue to threaten passage of America’s digital asset market structure legislation, but Democrats will likely cave in the end, because hey, it’s what they do best.
- Dems rage at GOP bait-and-switch on CLARITY ethics plan
- White House adviser claims July 4 target for CLARITY signing still possible
- Trump crypto riches coming at the expense of his voters
- One-man CFTC seeks end to Gemini oversight
- CFTC still fighting (Democrat-led) states over prediction markets
President Trump reportedly wants to have a finished, Senate-approved version of the CLARITY Act digital asset market structure legislation on his desk for signing by July 4. But efforts to resolve the outstanding bones of contention are proving harder than some expected, casting further doubt on whether the bill will be approved before Congress adjourns for its traditional August recess.
When the Senate Banking Committee advanced CLARITY last month, many of the Democrats who voted ‘aye’ made it clear that they would only cast a favorable vote on the Senate floor if certain unresolved aspects of the bill were addressed to their satisfaction.
Chief among these is the ‘ethics’ issue, aka language that would limit or outright prohibit elected officials and their families from profiting off crypto ventures. This includes Trump, whose family has made a serious fortune off their crypto schemes as the president simultaneously works to remove regulatory guardrails that might inhibit those ventures’ profitability.
On June 9, Punchbowl News’ Brendan Pedersen reported that a White House meeting involving presidential advisers and senators from both parties had gone off the rails when Republicans appeared to walk back ethics assurances they’d given their Dem colleagues ahead of the Banking Committee vote.
The GOP had floated the idea of allowing state attorneys-general to sue the Department of Justice (DOJ) if it failed to enforce federal crypto ethics rules. But the GOP now says this isn’t possible due to concerns raised by non-Banking senators. The GOP’s substitute offer to Dems—the ability to impeach federal officials who color outside the crypto lines—was viewed by Dems as wholly inadequate.
Punchbowl quoted Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) expressing his dissatisfaction with the bait-and-switch, saying he “can’t tell if [his GOP colleagues are] operating in good faith or bad faith.” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), a noted crypto booster, said Dems shouldn’t push too hard for the state AG enforcement provision, because “the shoe will be on the other foot someday.” Legal experts have also questioned the constitutionality of the state AG proposal.
Additional meetings are reportedly in the works, but there remains the question of whether Trump will accept any curbs on his family’s crypto activities. Republican senators previously believed they had Trump-approved ethics language last December, only for Trump to reject this at the last minute.
Meanwhile, Trump’s willingness to involve his family’s crypto businesses in official White House business shows no sign of letting up. On June 10, the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial (WLF) announced that it was an official sponsor of the mixed-martial arts event that took place on the White House lawn on Sunday (14), Trump’s 80th birthday.
On June 12, the UFC announced that a portion of the bonuses paid to Sunday’s winning fighters would be made via USD1, WLF’s dollar-backed stablecoin. Officially, WLF was dubbed the ‘Presenting Partner of a new $250,000 Performance of the Night bonus pool.’
As one observer told the Guardian, “this sounds like advertising … announcing to the world they are doing it in USD1 sounds like they are adverting to the world that USD1 is out there and that it is connected to the UFC and the White House.” To which the GOP would likely respond: Yes, and…?
Clarity Witticisms
On the June 12th episode of the Crypto In America podcast, White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt insisted that the July 4th CLARITY timeline is still possible. Witt also rejected the narrative that the GOP had gone back on its word to Dem senators after securing their committee votes.
But even assuming the ethics issue is somehow resolved, other issues remain. On June 10, Witt hosted a meeting at the White House with several national bodies representing both law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in a bid to assuage their CLARITY concerns.
The lawmen have expressed reservations regarding language in the bill that would largely exempt developers of noncustodial decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms from legal liability if their platforms are used by bad actors in the commission of crimes.
Crypto in America’s Eleanor Terrett reported that, while the talks were “substantive,” they didn’t alleviate law enforcement’s concerns that the language will limit their ability to pursue prosecutions of bad actors using DeFi to conduct illicit finance. As with the ethics issue, more talks are reportedly in the works to reach some kind of understanding.
But CLARITY’s obstacles don’t end there. There’s also the stablecoin ‘rewards’ issue, a fight that appeared to have been won by the crypto platforms like the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) digital asset exchange that wish to go on offering said rewards, but big banks have since indicated they haven’t yet begun to fight.
There is, of course, the very real possibility that none of these concerns will eventually sink CLARITY because the hapless Dems are the ones that will have to stand their ground. And with crypto-focused political action committees (PACs) willing to spend big to defeat any pol who dares stand in their way, one can almost hear Dems’ spines folding.
Consider this: if Dems cave on the ethics issue, who will hold their feet to the fire ahead of November’s midterm elections? Certainly not the GOP, who aren’t about to run ads accusing the Dems of letting the (checks notes) Republican president get away with ethical murder. So there really isn’t any downside to Dems talking big but ultimately voting ‘aye’ just to avoid a crypto-funded electoral debacle come November.
Trump voters are the source of his crypto profits
Coincidentally or not, the importance of the ethics fight was underscored last week in a pair of Reuters articles that focused on the Trump family’s crypto ventures while contrasting the family’s profits with retail investor losses.
The first article unfolds under the damning headline of “Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t.” Reuters previously estimated that the Trump crypto ventures had earned $802 million in the first half of 2025. Reuters now says the total sum reaped via these efforts is “at least $2.3 billion,” while a matching sum has been lost by the rank-and-file investors who bought into these ventures.
The four ventures tracked by Reuters are: WLF; the $TRUMP memecoin; block reward mining/BTC ‘treasury’ firm American Bitcoin Corp (NASDAQ: ABTC); and AI Financial Corp (formerly ALT 5 Sigma), a digital asset treasury firm that stockpiles WLF’s ‘governance’ token WLFI.
CoinGeek has covered the above ventures ad nauseam, so a lot of the Reuters reporting won’t be news to our readers. But it is telling that a prominent mainstream news site like Reuters didn’t bother pulling its punches in informing its readers that “the Trumps have not only enriched themselves to an unprecedented extent for a sitting U.S. president and his family, but have done so through crypto deals that carried little to no downside risk for them while resulting in big losses for retail investors.”
Incredibly, while many of the investors who talked to Reuters are bitter over their experiences, others don’t blame Trump for the major losses they’ve suffered. Indeed, an ALT 5 Sigma investor shrugged off his 79% loss (paper, since he’s refusing to sell), suggesting that the shares’ swan dive was due to Democrats shorting the stock.CFTC seeks even less to do on the crypto front
Assuming CLARITY becomes law of the land, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will be assigned the bulk of digital asset oversight. But the fact that Michael Selig remains the sole individual on the normally five-person commission six months after his confirmation as CFTC chairman is becoming a matter of concern on both sides of Washington’s political divide.
On June 11, Politico noted the growing discontent on Capitol Hill with the fact that the CFTC’s sole commissioner is moving swiftly to remove guardrails and authorize activities without anyone else there to suggest a slower, more deliberate pace might be warranted.
Former CFTC Chair Timothy Massad described the current CFTC as “a train wreck, with its credibility, independence and the morale of its staff decimated.” A current CFTC official, who wisely chose not to publish their name, said the CFTC “just doesn’t have the operational or moral capacity” to oversee crypto.
Not surprisingly, crypto operators take a contrary view. Chris Perkins of crypto investment firm 250 Digital Asset Management said Selig is “doing God’s work.” Jack Baghman, an attorney who represents the Gemini (NASDAQ: GEMI) digital asset exchange turned crypto-friendly prediction market, said “if people in the agency are nervous, good.”
Selig got his CFTC gig in part due to objections raised by Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss about Trump’s original pick. Despite having originally praised his nomination, the Winklevii later claimed that Brian Quintenz was “not in line” with Trump’s crypto goals/policies.
Quintenz then revealed that the twins had pressured him for assurances that he’d rescind the $5 million settlement Gemini had reached with the CFTC’s previous leadership in January 2025 for allegedly lying about their BTC-based exchange-traded product in CFTC filings. Quintenz refused to commit to undoing this deal, and this reportedly cost him the Winklevii’s support and (ultimately) the CFTC gig.
Fast forward to May 27, and the CFTC’s current leadership announced that it/he had joined Gemini in a motion for relief from judgment of the 2025 settlement. The CFTC (aka Selig) claimed that “a comprehensive review” of the matter had concluded that “the complaint should not have been filed.”
While the parties haven’t been so bold as to seek a refund of Gemini’s $5 million, they have mutually decided that “continuing enforcement of the consent order’s prospective provisions serves neither the CFTC’s mission nor the public interest.”
It’s clearly not in the interest of the Winklevii, who have donated millions to Trump-related causes and have pledged to spend tens of millions electing Trump-aligned candidates in the 2026 midterms. But whether the public is being served remains an open question.
I predict a riot
Among Selig’s more controversial actions to date is his willingness to use the power of his office to sue U.S. states that can’t seem to recall issuing sports betting licenses to prediction markets Kalshi or Polymarket. Selig maintains that the CFTC’s authority to regulate prediction markets’ ‘event contracts’ supersedes the right of U.S. states to decide what type of gambling goes on within their borders.
The CFTC added to this list of states on May 28 by suing Rhode Island’s attorney general for having the audacity to sue both Kalshi and Polymarket for offering sports betting to state residents without a permit. The CFTC’s reliably hyperbolic press release quoted Selig bemoaning the “onslaught of lawsuits” brought against “CFTC-registered exchanges.”
On June 12, New Mexico joined this ignominious club as the CFTC filed suit to counter the state’s illegal betting suit against Kalshi. Selig was quoted as saying New Mexico was “seeking to nullify black letter law and decades of judicial precedent by imposing state gaming laws on federally regulated derivatives exchanges subject to the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction.”
For what it’s worth, both Rhode Island and New Mexico have Democratic governors, matching the partisan pattern of all the suits that Selig/CFTC have so far filed against states attempting to assert their rights.
Trump put his presidential thumb on this scale late last month via a Truth Social post in which he claimed it is “critically important that the CFTC’s exclusive authority over Prediction Markets is maintained, and that they will thrive.” (For the record, Donald Trump Jr. is both a “double-digit millions” investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshi.)
Trump drew a comparison between the “SCUM” (again, mostly Democrats) in the states’ rights camp, and Selig, who Trump claimed is “respected by all” and “doing a great job.”
Among the ‘scum’ namechecked in Trump’s post was Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who responded by saying “the most corrupt President in our nation’s history wants to make sure states like ours can’t regulate prediction markets so his family and administration can keep profiting.”
As Trump was issuing his post, the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs began its review of the CFTC’s plans to regulate prediction markets. From Selig’s emphatic public pronouncements, you’d think that authority was already his, but apparently not, at least, not to the extent he’d prefer.
On June 10, the CFTC published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking public comments on “event contracts involving enumerated activities.” The public has been asked to weigh in on whether CFTC-registered entities should have the right to offer event contracts “referencing sporting events” or even more controversial subjects like “terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or conduct that is unlawful under federal or state law,” (kinda like the states that don’t allow sports betting).
That same day, Selig tweeted that the CFTC was only seeking “durable, transparent rules of the road to identify the contracts Congress directed it to scrutinize while letting legitimate markets move forward pursuant to the public interest.”
Selig also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Reporter in which he stressed that prediction market users rely on the platforms “to aggregate information and generate insights about future events, often faster and more accurately than conventional forecasting tools.” Because God only knows what horrors might befall users who erroneously ‘forecast’ how many goals Messi will score for Argentina over the next few weeks.
A few days before the CFTC issued its Notice, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent Selig a letter expressing her “deep concern” regarding the CFTC’s “inability to function as an effective regulator of prediction markets and cryptocurrencies.” Warren said recent reports of “the CFTC’s reported capture by industry poses severe risks to American families and our economy.”
Warren sought answers to a number of questions, including about reports that the CFTC allegedly fired career staff who objected to the haste with which the CFTC was clearing regulatory obstacles in prediction markets’ path. But unless the Dems retake the Senate in November’s midterm elections, Selig is almost certain to ignore Warren’s queries.
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