At 2:15 this afternoon, New York time, the Senate votes on the CLARITY Act. That is the bill that settles which American regulator is in charge of crypto.

Today's vote is cloture, which is the Senate deciding whether it is willing to open debate at all. It needs 60 votes and it makes nothing law. Republicans hold 53 seats, so at least seven Democrats have to vote yes.

Yesterday the opposition put it in writing. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, led seventeen other state attorneys general in a letter urging lawmakers to oppose the current text. Eight bank trade groups filed their own objection, among them the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America.

The banks say the draft still doesn't deal with deposit flight, which is money leaving ordinary bank accounts for stablecoin issuers that pay people to hold their coins.

Patrick Witt, the White House crypto adviser, said he is feeling very good about it. He called the vote "a political calculation, not a policy calculation."

The Senate needs more votes to open debate than it does to pass the bill. So clearing this afternoon would tell you the votes to pass are already there. Falling short would tell you the fights over ethics rules, stablecoin rewards and developer protections were never settled.

Senators Lummis, Boozman and Scott wrote the current text. They answered the deposit worry with a circuit breaker that lets the Treasury pause money leaving community banks, and the eight bank groups have read it and say it doesn't go far enough.

Traders cut their odds overnight. They now put the chance of this bill being signed into law this year at 18%, down from 30% when we showed you that number yesterday morning.

Last week people sold bitcoin three different ways. They sold coins on the exchanges, and they sold harder in the never-expiring futures bets that dominate crypto trading, where Glassnode counts seven times as much net selling as the week before.

The American bitcoin funds gave back $467.5 million on top of that, seven days after taking in $753.2 million.

Bitcoin closed above $76,600 every day from Thursday on and never left the band between there and $80,400. It's $78,143 this morning, up 1.55%.

Two thirds of all the bitcoin in existence is worth more than its owner paid for it, and people sitting on a gain are slow to sell in a panic. Buyers took the other side of the whole week and the price stayed where it was.

On Saturday, Dario Amodei published an essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier". He runs Anthropic, and his argument is that the companies building AI should slow the rate at which their models get more capable.

Within hours Sam Altman said OpenAI would do the same, and Google DeepMind agreed.

Trump waved it off and said he sees no need for new rules. On Monday investors sold the AI trade anyway. Nvidia fell 3% and the Nasdaq fell 0.6%.

Gold, the place people usually hide, fell 1.6% while bitcoin rose 0.55%.

That is one session and we aren't building anything on it. But crypto has spent two years going up and down with the same bet on chips, data centers and cheap money. On the day that bet wobbled, bitcoin went the other way.