Ripple CEO: 90% of US crypto trading offshore as CLARITY Act stalls

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse warned that 90% of US crypto trading has migrated offshore, as the CLARITY Act's July 4 passage deadline collapses under unresolved ethics disputes and a narrowing Senate calendar.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said 90% of US crypto trading activity has moved offshore because of regulatory uncertainty, as the CLARITY Act's July 4 passage window closes without a deal.

"Until we have clear rules of the road, capital and talent will continue to leave the US," Brad Garlinghouse, chief executive officer of Ripple Labs, said on June 13.

The CLARITY Act, which cleared the House 294-134 in July 2025 and passed the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 on May 14, now faces simultaneous fractures on ethics enforcement and Section 604 law enforcement provisions. Closed-door talks collapsed last week after the White House withdrew support for a mechanism allowing state attorneys general to enforce ethics rules tied to presidential crypto interests, according to Fox Business correspondent Eleanor Terrett. Republicans offered a substitute limiting enforcement to the US attorney general, which Democrats rejected as functionally circular.

With only 31 Senate session days remaining before the August recess and a 60-vote filibuster threshold still to clear, Senator Cynthia Lummis has warned that failure to act before the break could push the next viable legislative window to 2030. Galaxy Research currently puts the probability of passage in 2026 at 60% to 75%, down from above 70% on prediction markets earlier this year.

The Offshore Migration by the Numbers

Garlinghouse's estimate aligns with data showing US-based exchanges' share of global spot trading volume has declined steadily. The regulatory vacuum has pushed trading activity to jurisdictions with clearer frameworks, including Singapore, the UAE, and the European Union, where MiCA's July 1 compliance deadline is approaching. The CLARITY Act would assign SEC oversight to digital asset securities and new token offerings while giving the CFTC jurisdiction over spot digital commodities including Bitcoin and Ethereum, creating the statutory clarity Garlinghouse said is missing.

Ethics Standoff Blocks 60-Vote Path

The bill's path to 60 Senate votes runs through Democrats who have conditioned their support on ethics language. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said there is "no CLARITY Act without an ethics provision," a position echoed by Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, the two Democrats whose committee votes produced the bill's nominal bipartisan margin. The White House has said it will accept ethics rules that apply uniformly "from the president all the way down to the brand new intern" but will not accept language targeting a specific officeholder or family — a reference to Trump family crypto ventures that have generated an estimated $2.3 billion across holdings, per public disclosure estimates.

The May 14 committee markup captured the fault line precisely: the Van Hollen amendment, which would have barred the president, vice president, and members of Congress from issuing or promoting digital commodities, failed 13-11 on party lines. That rejection deferred rather than resolved the dispute, and the same senators now hold leverage on the floor.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.