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Washington Is Holding Two Crypto Meetings This Week and Has No Bill to Discuss

By Ujunwa Juliet Ihiasota • •5 min read
Washington Is Holding Two Crypto Meetings This Week and Has No Bill to Discuss

President Trump is expected to meet crypto and prediction-market executives at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday, August 19.

The next day, the CFTC convenes its first Innovation Advisory Committee session, opening with a panel titled Crypto’s Regulatory Evolution: From Uncertainty to Clarity.

The title is optimistic. The legislation it refers to now has roughly a 10% chance of passing this year.

Who Is Expected

Reported attendees for the Wednesday meeting include executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, Robinhood, Polymarket and Kalshi, plus a16z, Chainlink, Paradigm and the Digital Chamber.

Kraken, Gemini, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have also been invited, though an invitation is not attendance.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is slated to appear. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig is expected, along with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Two caveats matter here. No final attendee list has been released, and the President’s participation has not been officially confirmed by the White House.

Reporting traces to Bloomberg and CoinDesk citing people briefed on the planning, plus dispatches from journalists Eleanor Mueller and Eleanor Terrett. This is a well-sourced expectation rather than a published schedule.

The Thursday Meeting Is the Substantive One

The CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee is a 35-member panel drawn from crypto, derivatives, prediction markets, traditional exchanges and financial infrastructure.

Its membership includes Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong, Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse, a16z crypto managing partner Chris Dixon, Chainlink Labs chief executive Sergey Nazarov, Kalshi’s Tarek Mansour and Paradigm managing partner Alana Palmedo.

Executives from CME Group, Nasdaq, Intercontinental Exchange and DTCC, including chief executive Frank La Salle, are also expected.

The Wednesday session is being described as a small-group kickoff ahead of it. That framing is worth holding onto, because a photo opportunity and a standing advisory committee produce very different kinds of output.

DateEventStatus
August 19White House meeting, Eisenhower Executive Office BuildingExpected, not officially confirmed
August 20CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee, first sessionScheduled, 35 members
September 15Senate cloture vote on motion to proceed, CLARITY ActScheduled, 2:15pm Eastern
No dateSEC Regulation Crypto proposal voteCancelled August 13, not rescheduled

The Odds Kept Falling

Galaxy Research has cut its estimate of CLARITY Act passage this year to 10%, down from 30% earlier in August and 50% before that.

Polymarket traders put the probability of the President signing the bill this year at around 19%.

Optimisus tracked that collapse in the piece on the September 15 date and the worsening odds, when the range across forecasters ran from 16% to 30%. The upper end of that range has now come down to meet the lower end.

Galaxy’s stated reasoning is arithmetic rather than political. The Senate returns September 14 and will be in session for roughly two weeks before midterm campaigning takes over.

One clarification on sourcing. At least one market summary noted that the 10% figure circulated via social media and was not independently confirmed in its own research, so treat it as widely reported analyst commentary rather than a published Galaxy report.

The Regulatory Path Also Stalled

The industry’s fallback was always agency rulemaking rather than legislation. That route hit its own delay four days before this week’s meetings.

The SEC cancelled its August 14 vote on Regulation Crypto with one day’s notice, citing an unforeseen scheduling issue. Optimisus covered that in the piece on the cancelled vote, including the detail that the rule had already reached White House regulatory review.

So both tracks are paused simultaneously, which was not the situation two weeks ago.

Galaxy’s own note struck a more constructive tone on this point, expecting the Commission to publish the texts of Reg Crypto, the innovation exemption, or both within the next several weeks regardless of what happens to the legislation.

That is the case for reading this week as sequencing rather than failure. Agencies may simply be waiting to see what Congress does before committing.

Why Prediction Markets Are in the Room

The guest list is not purely crypto, and that is a signal.

Kalshi and Polymarket are prediction-market platforms, and Kalshi arrives after a jurisdictional fight. The CFTC used emergency authority to order the platform to keep operating in New York after the state attorney general sought to shut it down.

That is a federal agency overriding a state enforcement action, which is a live preemption question rather than a settled one.

Grouping prediction markets with digital assets under one advisory committee suggests the CFTC intends to treat them as a single regulatory category. For anyone building in either space, that framing matters more than anything said at a photo call.

What Would Constitute Real Progress

Meetings are not policy. The measurable outcomes to watch for are narrow and specific.

A rescheduled date for the SEC’s Reg Crypto vote would be the clearest one. Published rule text would be better.

On the legislative side, the signal is whether any Democratic senators publicly move toward supporting cloture. Seven or eight crossovers are needed, and only two supported the bill at committee stage.

Atkins has been publicly constructive toward the sector, including when he voiced support for DeFi, and this administration has convened the industry before, as Optimisus covered at the first White House crypto summit.

That summit produced announcements. This one arrives with a cancelled agency vote behind it and a cloture vote ahead of it, which is a harder position to hold a productive meeting from.

Bitcoin traded near $63,000 into the week, with regulatory uncertainty cited among the reasons ETF demand has been cautious. Markets have largely priced the stall already.

Sources

This is not financial advice.

Optimisus covers crypto and technology news for readers who want the detail behind the headline.

Topics
#Bitcoin #BTC #CFTC #CLARITY Act #Coinbase #Crypto #Policy #Regulation #Ripple #SEC #White House