The U.S. Senate failed to move into deliberations on the “Clarity bill,” which addresses digital asset market structure.

On Sept. 16 local time, blockchain outlet The Crypto Basic reported that Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson (찰스 호스킨슨) said the result matched a warning he had issued earlier.

In a procedural vote on Sept. 15, the Senate failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance the bill. The bill did not move to the next stage after all Democrats and 4 Republican senators voted against it. After the vote, Hoskinson reaffirmed his position, saying it was “as predicted.”

Hoskinson had already raised the possibility days earlier that the Clarity bill could stall. He said the crypto industry’s political standing had weakened as it became more closely associated with celebrity-themed tokens, memecoins and speculative trading. In that environment, he judged it would be hard to push through comprehensive crypto legislation.

In a follow-up livestream, Hoskinson explained the reasons for the failure in more detail. He said Congress tried to pack too many regulatory issues into a single sweeping bill and failed to build enough bipartisan consensus in advance.

He also offered his experience participating in legislative work in Wyoming as a comparison. Citing the Stem Cell Freedom Act, he said it involved broad consultations, negotiations and coalition-building before reaching the final stage, and passed both chambers without opposition. He said the Clarity bill lacked that kind of prior coordination.

He also cited as a problem the failure to sufficiently draw on overseas examples that already have crypto regulatory frameworks. He said lawmakers could have reviewed Europe, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and the Crown Dependencies, and in particular needed to examine the European Union’s MiCA and the Abu Dhabi Global Market framework. He argued that referencing regulatory models tested elsewhere first could have made the legislative design options clearer.

Hoskinson also took aim at the legislative approach. He argued the bill should have treated stablecoins, digital securities, commodities, custody, taxation and decentralised finance separately rather than bundling them all at once. Dividing the issues would allow regulatory questions in each area to be organised separately and would be advantageous in building bipartisan consensus item by item, he said.

He also pointed to a lack of clarity in regulatory definitions as a key problem. He said a clearer definition of digital securities was needed and that existing securities laws also required updates with a more modern approach. He said lawmakers should have drawn sharper distinctions among types of digital assets rather than broadly categorising crypto as commodities, and should have first decided which regulatory framework applied to each category.

He also raised questions about supervisory capacity. Hoskinson questioned whether the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sufficient staffing, authority and resources to oversee a crypto market that could eventually grow to several trillion dollars. He said pushing a comprehensive bill while the allocation of regulatory authority remained unclear added to the burden.

Political factors also could not be ignored. Hoskinson stressed the importance of maintaining bipartisan support throughout the legislative process. He also said political and ethical controversy surrounding crypto activities involving people in the administration made it even harder to form a consensus.

Ultimately, Hoskinson’s explanation went beyond the vote result itself. He said the Clarity bill tried to handle a complex regulatory agenda all at once, and failed to clear the Senate because consensus-building, consultation and establishing definitions were not sufficiently achieved in the process.

As predicted https://t.co/6kqxy86Hct