What Does the Senate CLARITY Act Setback Mean for XRP?

Ripple News: What Does the Senate CLARITY Act Setback Mean for XRP?

• XRP-USD

In Ripple news today, the US Senate voted 49-50 on September 15, 2026, against invoking cloture on the motion to proceed to the CLARITY Act, falling 11 votes short of the 60 needed to advance the crypto market-structure bill.

Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty responded on X the same day, telling XRP holders not to lose sight of the token’s existing legal position despite the setback.

This is not simply a bill stalling in procedure. In Ripple’s framing, it separates the fate of comprehensive federal crypto regulation from the narrower question of where XRP already stands under existing law.

Alderoty argued that the vote’s outcome does not reopen or alter XRP’s legal footing, pointing to a 2023 federal court ruling and more recent regulatory guidance as the basis for that position.

CLARITY Act News: What Does the Failed Cloture Vote Actually Mean?

The 49-50 result was a procedural vote on whether to proceed to debate, not a final vote on the bill’s substantive text. No Democratic senator voted to invoke cloture, and Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran also voted no, according to the reporting on the tally.

The defeat came after another round of intense, last-minute negotiations, the kind of eleventh-hour horse-trading that had produced incremental progress on the bill for months.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse called the result disappointing and said he expects the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to continue rulemaking that fills the gap left by the stalled legislation.

That expectation frames the near-term path: absent a statute, agency action becomes the primary mechanism for defining rules across the broader digital-asset market.

Ripple News: Why is Alderoty Unfazed by XRP’s Legal Position?

Alderoty’s argument rests on two prior developments rather than the CLARITY Act itself. First, he cited the 2023 federal court ruling in SEC v. Ripple, characterizing it as having established that XRP is not a security.

That ruling was more granular in practice: Judge Analisa Torres found Ripple’s institutional sales constituted unregistered securities offerings, while programmatic exchange sales and certain other distributions did not meet the investment-contract test, per the summary judgment filed in the Southern District of New York.

Second, Alderoty pointed to a March 2026 joint interpretation from the SEC and CFTC that he said named XRP a digital commodity, a characterization consistent with Ripple’s own public statement on the matter but one that warrants independent verification of the underlying agency document before being treated as fully established.

Source: finance.yahoo.com