President Trump convened cryptocurrency industry leaders and top financial regulators at the White House this week to press for passage of a sweeping digital assets bill, a move one attendee called a signal that the administration "is not going to slow down."
The Wednesday meeting in the Roosevelt Room brought together SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, and figures from both the crypto sector and traditional finance, Fox Business reported. At the center of the discussion: the CLARITY Act, a bill that would define digital assets, network tokens, and digital commodities under federal law and assign clear regulatory lanes to the SEC and CFTC without overlap or contradiction.
Cody Carbone, CEO of The Digital Chamber, attended the session and described the atmosphere in a subsequent Fox Business interview. His main takeaway was blunt.
"The U.S. is not going to slow down in its objective of becoming the crypto capital of the world."
Trump, according to Carbone's account, "double and triple" downed on the message that the United States must lead not just in cryptocurrency but in all technological innovation. No direct quotes from the president were published, and Carbone's characterizations are the only public window into Trump's specific remarks at the meeting.
The legislative calendar is the pressure point. The Senate is expected to begin procedural consideration of the CLARITY Act during a three-week session starting in mid-September. After that comes a lengthy October recess, then the November midterm elections, then a lame-duck session where ambitious legislation rarely survives.
Carbone framed the window in stark terms:
"We don't want to leave this up for chance. This is the time. We've never been closer to enacting a market structure bill."
That urgency has been building for months. Senate Democrats have stalled crypto legislation over ethics-related demands, eating into the calendar even as the administration pushes for action before the political environment shifts.
The fallback plan, as Carbone described it, is executive-branch action. He said SEC Chairman Atkins and CFTC Chairman Selig both indicated they would move to implement many of the CLARITY Act's provisions through the regulatory process if Congress fails to act. Neither Atkins nor Selig was quoted directly, but Carbone's account was unambiguous.
"It was very clear from the president's comments and from the discussion that the U.S. government and the Trump administration are not going to wait, necessarily, for legislation. The SEC and the CFTC have been given the authority from this White House and the mandate to move very quickly."
That posture, legislation preferred, regulation if necessary, puts Congress on notice. Pass the bill or watch the agencies write the rules themselves.
Carbone made the case for the CLARITY Act partly by pointing to what he described as the market impact of the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law passed earlier. He claimed the U.S. stablecoin market "almost doubled overnight" in the first year after the GENIUS Act became law. That figure was not independently verified in the interview, and no source or methodology was offered.
Still, the argument is straightforward: clear rules attract capital. Carbone said the CLARITY Act would extend that principle across the broader digital assets market.
"It'll give retail investors, institutional investors more consumer protections, more disclosures. When you pass clear rules of the road, like we saw with the GENIUS Act, the market responds immediately. CLARITY will do that for the rest of the market."
The bill's core promise is durability, a regulatory framework designed to outlast any single administration. Carbone emphasized that point, though he appeared to misspeak or overstate when he said the framework "is not just going to be here for decades and decades to come," a phrasing that undercuts his own argument if taken literally. His broader point was that legislation, unlike executive action, creates lasting certainty.
That distinction matters. Regulatory guidance can be reversed by the next administration. A statute cannot, at least not without another act of Congress. For an industry that spent years watching the previous administration pursue enforcement actions instead of writing rules, the difference between a law and a memo is not academic.
Carbone asserted that "Republicans and Democrats in Congress" want the CLARITY Act done, especially before the election. He did not name specific Democratic supporters or cite a co-sponsor count, and the source offers no independent verification of the bipartisan claim beyond his word.
The shrinking Republican legislative calendar makes the timeline even more precarious. With multiple priorities competing for floor time in a compressed September session, crypto legislation is not guaranteed a vote even if it has the support Carbone describes.
Carbone acknowledged the possibility of failure but framed the meeting as reassurance that the administration would not let the issue die.
"If the ultimate fate of CLARITY over the next six weeks is that it will not pass, and we're hoping that's not the case, then I would imagine the SEC and the CFTC will get even more active very, very quickly, shortly thereafter."
He called the meeting "a breath of fresh air and almost a sigh of relief," adding that even if there is "some disappointment about where the legislation stands right now," the administration "is not going to let up."
The White House meeting did not happen in a vacuum. The cryptocurrency industry has become one of the most aggressive political spenders in Washington. During the 2024 election cycle, the industry spent over $133 million, influencing nearly 100 races, the Washington Examiner reported. Companies like Kraken, Uniswap, Jump Trading, and Riot Platforms have actively recruited former administration officials to secure regulatory influence.
That spending has created a new class of Washington operatives. Former Trump lawyer Jim Trusty and attorney Jeff Ifrah launched NexusOne Consulting, a lobbying firm near the White House focused on crypto and AI policy. Ifrah described the moment as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future of tech policy."
The revolving door between government and the crypto lobby is not unique to this administration, but the scale is new. When an industry spends nine figures to elect friendly lawmakers and then sends its representatives to the Roosevelt Room, the access is hard to miss.
Critics have raised conflict-of-interest concerns about the president's own crypto ties. National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy has documented the growth of World Liberty Financial, a Trump-linked cryptocurrency venture whose investments grew from $2.7 million shortly before the 2024 election to $367 million. Trump personally announced the sale of WLF's token, called $WLFI, on October 15, 2024, during the final stretch of the presidential campaign. McCarthy wrote that "the conflicts of interest can't be ignored."
Those concerns have not slowed the administration's push. If anything, the White House appears to view crypto policy as both an economic priority and a political asset heading into the midterms.
One notable gap in the public account of the meeting: who else was in the room. Beyond Carbone, Atkins, and Selig, the only description offered is that "key figures in the cryptocurrency and digital assets industries" and "representatives from traditional finance sector including exchanges" attended. No other names were published.
Senate leadership tensions over the pace of the broader legislative agenda add another layer of uncertainty. Even with White House pressure, floor time is a finite resource, and Senate leaders have shown caution about moving too fast on politically charged bills.
The absence of direct quotes from Trump, Atkins, or Selig also limits what can be independently assessed about the meeting's substance. Everything the public knows about what was said inside the Roosevelt Room comes filtered through Carbone, an industry advocate with a direct stake in the outcome.
That does not make his account false. It means the meeting's significance depends, for now, on whether the legislative and regulatory actions he described actually materialize in the weeks ahead.
Carbone closed his interview with a broad summary of the administration's posture:
"They're going to do everything that they can to make sure that U.S. entrepreneurs feel very, very comfortable, U.S. investors feel very, very comfortable, that they can continue to build wealth and to invest in new products right here in the U.S."
Clear rules, open markets, and a government that gets out of the way, that is the promise. September will show whether Congress can deliver, or whether the regulators will have to do it for them.
