What happened
The Senate's final draft of the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that has bounced between committees since 2024, now includes an ethics provision setting a $15,000 threshold. Senior federal officials holding equity at or above that figure in any company that issues or sponsors digital assets would be required to divest, per CryptoSlate's Friday report. Trump signaled his support this week, a shift from the White House's earlier posture of leaving crypto ethics language to Congress.
The catch is the scope. The rule reaches into the executive branch and independent agencies, but the drafters carved a lane around the president's family business, which has moved into token launches, stablecoin issuance, and mining exposure since early 2025. Senate aides familiar with the negotiations described the carveout as a condition of White House sign-off.
Democratic staff on the Banking Committee flagged it publicly within hours, calling the exemption a structural loophole rather than an oversight.
Why it matters
This is the first time a sitting president has publicly backed a hard-number ethics floor for federal officials holding crypto equity. The $15,000 line is low. It catches deputy assistant secretaries, agency general counsels, and Fed staff economists who might hold a few thousand dollars of a small-cap token or a stake in a token-issuing startup.
It does not catch the Trump Organization's crypto arm, which has been the most-watched conflict-of-interest question in Washington's crypto policy debate for eighteen months. The optics are the story. A rule that binds a career civil servant with a $16,000 stake in a mid-cap DeFi protocol while leaving the president's family ventures untouched will define how the crypto industry reads the CLARITY Act's ethics framework.