Cloture needed 60 votes and drew 49. Thom Tillis switched his vote to no and asked to enter a motion to reconsider, which one industry group says leaves room for a second attempt within two days.
The Senate declined to open debate on the CLARITY Act on Tuesday. Cloture on the motion to proceed drew 49 votes in favor and 50 against, eleven short of the 60 it needed, and the bill that would have given digital assets their first comprehensive federal framework stopped there.
Cloture does not pass a bill or amend it. It decides only whether the chamber may begin formal debate. MiningPool set out the arithmetic a week before the vote: Republicans hold 53 seats, so seven Democrats had to cross even on the assumption that every Republican voted yes. The 49 votes recorded in favor fell below the 53 seats the majority holds on its own.
The Block reported that Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who has defended the bill's stablecoin compromise, voted yes and then changed his vote to no before asking to enter a motion to reconsider. Ji Hun Kim, chief executive of the Crypto Council for Innovation, told the outlet that the motion allows "another cloture vote within the next two days." No second vote had been scheduled as of Wednesday morning.
The Block named Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York among the Democrats voting no. Which Republicans withheld support beyond Tillis is not established by any public tally.
The provision that held the bill up was never market structure. As MiningPool reported on September 8, the sticking point was an ethics restriction on officials and their spouses issuing tokens, and the argument runs between senators who want divestment and those who will accept blind trusts. Coverage of the dispute has centered on President Trump's stake in World Liberty Financial and the TRUMP memecoin. The stablecoin compromise Lummis and Tillis defended in May against five banking trade groups was not the provision in dispute.
Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican, said "Senate Democrats proved they were never truly serious about protecting consumers." Tillis said "This is not the end for the Clarity Act." Patrick Witt, the White House crypto adviser, said "The full cost of today's result may not be known for years." All three were speaking after a procedural defeat rather than a vote on the bill's contents.
Prices fell around the vote, though the two are harder to tie together than the sequence suggests. The Block put bitcoin at $75,756 as of 10:20 p.m. ET on Tuesday, down 2.85 percent over 24 hours, with ether off 4.5 percent, solana off 5.4 percent and the GMCI 30 index down 4.16 percent. Coinbase closed more than 10 percent lower, Circle down 11.4 percent, Strategy down 5.4 percent and Bitmine down 8.4 percent. Bitcoin had run from about $77,000 on Monday to nearly $80,000 earlier in the week before sliding.
CoinDesk, citing CoinGlass, put liquidations at roughly $571 million of long positions over 24 hours against about $100 million of shorts, the largest tally since August 22. Bitcoin and ether longs accounted for around $190 million each.
Two analysts quoted by The Block argued against reading the selloff as a verdict on the legislation. Justin d'Anethan, head of research at Arctic Digital, said the defeat "definitely stings but it's nothing truly structural." Rachael Lucas of BTC Markets said "legislation was never the binding constraint" and described the cycle as rates dependent rather than narrative driven. Both are assertions about what was already priced in, and neither outlet published positioning data alongside them.
One thing the vote has not yet produced is a public record of who cast it. The Senate's own roll call list for the 119th Congress ran only to vote 232 when checked on Wednesday morning, a cloture motion on a district judge nomination taken on September 14. Until that list is updated, the published accounts of Tuesday's tally rest on newsroom observation of the floor rather than on the Senate's own sheet.
