CLARITY Act on “Death Watch”: Can Crypto’s Biggest Bill Survive?

Cody Carbone (0:00)

The White House is going to have to come out and say something on the ethics proposal from Senators Tillis and Gallego. There hasn't been a lot of commentary over the last five or six weeks since that proposal initially went to the White House. Do they like it? I don't know. Only the president will be able to answer that in the White House General Council.

You're 100% right, we're not gonna get to 60 without it, but the White House has done a lot here.

SPEAKER_2 (0:29)

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Renato Mariotti (1:30)

Welcome to The Policy Protocol, your weekly espresso shot of the latest in FinTech law and policy.

Everything that happened distilled down to what actually matters. I'm Renato Mariotti and I'm here with my co-host, Rebecca Rettig. Where are you and what are you doing, Rebecca? I see the TXSE pendant that you've got on. What's going on?

Rebecca Rettig (1:54)

I'm in Texas this week.

This is for the Texas Stock Exchange. I'm actually in Dallas and I grew up near Chicago. And I will say there's like these slight Chicago vibes in Dallas. I can't figure out what it is. Some of the stores maybe. But even when I was growing up and we'd go to places in Chicago, they'd have like a Chicago store and a Dallas store. So there's something that like connects them. So we're somehow connected this week. But I have a busy fall. I know you do too. So we'll be doing sort of like a round robin of places where we film the show.

Renato Mariotti (2:28)

Yeah, that's going to be fun. Lots of conferences coming up in the next week or two. I know next week we won't have a show. I'll be on the Avalanche Summit with CoinDesk. But we have, you and I are going to be at, it seems like one conference after another in the next few weeks, just talking about everything crypto findeck.

Rebecca Rettig (2:46)

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Renato Mariotti (2:49)

Well, okay. We've got a lot going on this week. What are you thinking about this week, Rebecca?

Rebecca Rettig (2:54)

Yeah. I mean, for me, the hot topic of the week is the AMC Robinhood Showdown on X. Adam Aaron, who is the CEO of AMC, somehow found out that there was a token trading outside the US that tracks AMC stock and he was pissed. I don't know if tokenization is like a new thing for him. But he goes on X and he runs through a bunch of adjectives, and he says, this is contemptible and this is vile.

Vlad comes back pretty chill and is like, what's the concern? Just not even remotely flummoxed in any way. Then Adam Aron comes back and says, you should cease and desist and he spells it D-E-C-I-S-T. Dan Gallagher comes back. Dan Gallagher who previously commissioner at the SEC, and a long time general counsel, Robin Hood comes back and is like, we know what we're doing here, you need to relax, you're not going to get sued.

I think the interesting part of this is, this is maybe a way that we're exploding tokenization even further into the normal lexicon of things. Vlad was on CNBC Squawk Box this week talking about it. He was also pretty chill about it. He interestingly was like, this is trading outside the US, AMC should be happy because it brings them a whole new cohort of people who are holding their stock. The interesting thing that came up where I think Vlad did not have a straight answer yet was, okay, well, can you get dividends? The answer was yes. Then they said, well, are you going to be voting your shares of the underlying stock? Because there is actually underlyings of AMC in this tokenization. He said, well, I'm personally not going to do it. They said, yeah, of course, not you. But what about Robinhood? He said, well, we might have a plan on that. We'll get back to you. I think it's really interesting because a lot of what I've heard from traditional financial players is like, we don't understand these derivative stocks. Why would I want to own any, especially from real equities traders, they're like, why do I want something that doesn't give me dividends? Why do I want something that doesn't give me voting rights? This doesn't make sense to me.