GSR legal chief puts Clarity Act passage below 50% odds, citing stablecoin yield and ethics concerns

The Clarity Act has less than an even chance of reaching the president's desk in the current congressional session, Joshua Riezman, chief legal and strategy officer at crypto market maker GSR, said in an interview with The Block at Consensus Miami on Wednesday.

During the conversation, Riezman espoused a more guarded read than the industry optimism circulating on the conference floor.

"If I had to put a view on it, that it gets done in this session, I'm probably sub 50% right now personally, but that's not zero," Riezman told The Block's Kelvin Sparks.

The Clarity Act previously cleared the House and has since been in a prolonged Senate deliberation, with the Banking and Agriculture committees each producing separate drafts.

Notably, the Senate Banking side has become the primary holdup, stalled principally over stablecoin yield, particularly whether rewards can accrue on stablecoins. The issue has intensified as the GENIUS Act and broader stablecoin growth pushed the banking lobby to take a harder line on yield-bearing products.

Bipartisan Senate staff have been working daily for months to close the gap, and senators on both sides have reached a compromise they're prepared to move on, Riezman said.

It is, by his own account, a genuine compromise. "Like any good compromise, both sides are not 100% happy," he said.

Beyond the yield debate

Stablecoin yield is not the only pressure point.

Riezman pointed to lingering questions on both sides of the aisle about the president and his family's involvement in the crypto industry, and whether that issue gets addressed in the bill itself, as a further complication.

More than 100 amendments targeting stablecoins, ethics, and DeFi were filed ahead of Thursday's Senate Banking Committee markup, The Block reported. Labor unions have also come out against the bill ahead of the vote.

Riezman's assessment puts him in direct tension with Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal, who said that the Clarity Act will pass this summer and urged banks to accept the stablecoin compromise on the table.

If the Clarity Act stalls in this session, Riezman argued, it likely gets pushed back significantly.

GRS’s executive opined that this outcome could damage U.S. competitiveness, leaving consumers and retail participants without the protections the bill is meant to deliver. "There's really nobody who wins in that scenario," he said.

Tokenization

On the longer arc of the industry, Riezman was more bullish. With stablecoins at roughly $300 billion, tokenized Treasurys at approximately $15 billion, and tokenized private credit near $3 billion, he sees all three markets trending toward vertical growth.

He said he sees the stablecoin market eventually growing to between $1 trillion and $3 trillion, with a significant portion of S&P 500, Nasdaq, and NYSE-listed companies tokenized within the next couple of years.

"There's no reason in my mind that's not going to one trillion, two trillion, three trillion dollars," he said of the stablecoin market.

Tokenization-as-a-service will commoditize quickly, Riezman added, with the real value ultimately accruing to end investors through disintermediated stock-borrow economics and to fund issuers through expanded LP distribution, not to any single infrastructure layer.