Brian Armstrong Says WSJ Will Blame Coinbase for CLARITY’s Collapse

A Pre-Emptive Strike

Armstrong did not wait for the alleged article to come out; instead, he took to X and aired his thoughts, stating:

“Here we go again!. The WSJ is working on a story blaming Coinbase and me personally for the CLARITY Act not passing.”

He then went a step further, accusing the paper of “regurgitating bank lobby talking points” and claiming the Journal “takes direction from bank lobbyists instead of reporting the truth.”

As of Saturday, the outlet had not published the story Armstrong described, so its actual argument is still unknown. What is known is the record the paper would be drawing on, and Armstrong laid out his version of it in what he called “the boring TLDR.”

What Happened in January?

The case against Armstrong starts on Jan. 14, when on the eve of a scheduled Senate Banking Committee markup, he announced that Coinbase could not support the draft bill, writing that “no bill is better than a bad bill.” The committee postponed the session almost immediately, and the markup was not rescheduled for months.

Armstrong’s objections centered on stablecoin yield, a sore point for banks, which argue that interest-like rewards on stablecoins could pull deposits out of the banking system. In Saturday’s post, he said he opposed the January draft because it “needed a lot of work on DeFi, tokenization, CFTC authority, and stablecoin rewards.”

In other words, decentralized finance (DeFi), tokenized securities, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) reach and yield all had to change before Coinbase would sign on.

From Blocker to Backer

By Armstrong’s account, the delay did its job:

All four of the items I called out were fixed in the draft that then went through the committee about four months later.

The industry rallied behind a yield compromise in early May, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill 15-9 on May 14, with Democratic Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Ruben Gallego both voting in favor.

“The final draft of CLARITY that went to the Senate was great, and I strongly supported it,” Armstrong said. Coinbase lobbied hard for it through the summer, and days before the floor vote, Armstrong predicted crypto clarity would come either way.

Why Is the Blame Game Starting Now?

Because the bill is dead for now, and the vote was close enough for everyone to find a villain.

The cloture vote on Sept. 15 fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance, even after sponsors made 126 concessions. That package included a Treasury “circuit breaker” meant to stop stablecoin rewards from draining community-bank deposits, the same fight Armstrong picked in January.

It is worth mentioning that Alsobrooks and Gallego, who backed the bill in committee, voted no on cloture.

Markets took the hit as U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) bled $450 million on Sept. 15, and bitcoin’s price slid below $76,000. In Washington, the finger-pointing started right away. Rep. Maxine Waters blamed missing ethics safeguards around the president’s crypto ventures, while Rep. Tom Emmer called the defeat a mere delay.

What Comes After CLARITY?

Armstrong has already moved on, and after the vote, he said, “The CLARITY Act didn’t advance in the Senate today, which was a disappointment,” arguing that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the CFTC have the tools to write rules themselves. SEC Chair Paul Atkins pledged to “act decisively within the SEC’s statutory authority,” and CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said his agency is “locked in and ready to ship its rules.”

The legislative door is not fully shut, as seven Democratic senators vowed on Sept. 16 to keep pushing the bill.

Whether Armstrong’s pre-emptive defense holds up depends on what the Journal actually prints, but he closed Saturday’s post with a prediction of his own: “people are smart enough to see through it these days, and it backfires on them every time.”