Plume GC: CLARITY Act Deadline Is Fast Approaching (Full Update)

**Salman Banaei** (0:00)
Hey Andy, hey Rob, how are you doing?

**Robbie** (0:01)
Good to have you, buddy.

**Andy** (0:02)
Good to see you.

**Salman Banaei** (0:03)
Good to see you.

**Robbie** (0:04)
Thanks for having me. How was your weekend? Did you get some time off catching grass?

**Salman Banaei** (0:09)
I did. I got kids that are 10 and 7, so I spend a lot of the weekend driving around the DMV area.

**Robbie** (0:17)
Love it, love it. Yeah, we had that smog in New York. I was in Cape Cod. It was nice to get away from the city, that's for sure.
And it sounds like you had a busy end of the week in DC, and so, yeah, I know we're on the precipice of clarity. I think we're looking at the August 10th or 17th deadline is kind of what we're hearing. And I mean, people are throwing all sorts of figures and predictions and takes. So I wanted to get your insights as to what your experience was the last couple of days in DC. And yeah, man, fill us in.

**Salman Banaei** (0:51)
Yeah, well, while I was in DC, there was basically four themes to the discussions. And the gap is both a political one and a policy one. I think the policy ones, we can cross those. The political ones though are challenging.
Probably the one that's the biggest impediment to this bill becoming law is around ethics. So Donald Trump indicated, I think, he made about $2 billion last year in his latest financial disclosures off of crypto, mostly off of his meme coin.
And that's fueled a lot of controversy, to say the least, publicly, in particular among Senate Democrats. And we need at least nine of them, I think, just given that there seems to be a couple of Republicans that won't be voting for this bill to get to 60, which is what we need for this bill to get out of the Senate. Nonetheless, it was clear from senior Dems and their representatives that Dems do want to get to yes. Now, I don't know whether that's signaling to stay on the good side of the industry or whether it's earnest. I think it's earnest. I do think they recognize that while this bill may not be perfect, it's a step in the right direction. And it removes this cloud of not having legislation in the space over the heads of Democrats, which has been perceived as a political problem for Democrats coming out of the Biden administration. So I'm optimistic.
I spoke with a friend in the administration a few weeks ago. He asked me what I thought the odds of this bill passing were at the time I said 20 percent.
He said, you're being very optimistic. So I actually came out of the meetings last week feeling even better. I think we're at 40, maybe even 50 percent. I think if we can get a workable outcome on ethics, one that in particular would prohibit the use of meme coins for fundraising by federal politicians, I think we can get enough Democrats to support this. One of the things that came across in meetings, particularly with Republicans, was that over the weekend, we would be seeing some language on ethics. By today, actually, was their goal. I don't think that's come out yet. I haven't seen that language. It may be being socialized first with a select group of Democratic senators.
That are looking at this issue very closely. Ruben Gallego being one of them. I'm hearing Adam Schiff is another one. And then one or two others. So there may be some private negotiations going on as we speak around the ethics language. So fingers crossed that we can get to a good outcome on that point. And I think the test will be whether the ethics rules will be durable enough to prevent the kind of thing that we saw happen earlier in the administration. Or actually, I guess the meme point launched the day before via the administration.

**Robbie** (4:34)
Yeah, you can't retroactively go back and do anything, but obviously forward-looking is the goal.
When it comes to that ethics point specifically, you mentioned just about the prohibiting the future use case of, you can call it meme coins or tokens as a means for fundraising for federal officials. Are there other components of what getting that ethics clause over the line would entail? Is there other negotiation points that come specifically from either party that are notable to mention?

**Salman Banaei** (5:08)
Yeah, so one of the things that I'm hearing that's being negotiated is, well, you can't trust the federal government to police itself. You can't expect the executive branch to police itself. And so there are negotiations happening as to relating to the authority of state attorneys general to have some kind of enforcement power in addition to federal law enforcement. So that is one of the areas that is being explored.