Crypto appeared on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s radar not long after her presidential campaign fizzled out in 2019. The more she learned, she said, the more frustrated she became that lawmakers seemed content to leave it alone. In 2025, Gillibrand was the lead Democratic sponsor of the GENIUS Act, which laid down federal rules for stablecoins. This year, she played much the same role for the CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s great unfinished legislative project, pressing fellow Democrats for their votes. The sweeping bill would have moved much of digital-asset trading out of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s securities-law regime and into a new framework overseen by the chronically underfunded and much weaker Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “In my opinion, the CLARITY Act was a financial crisis waiting to happen,” says Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank of New York official. When FTX collapsed in 2022, the damage remained largely contained within crypto because digital assets still had relatively few connections to banks and traditional markets. CLARITY, Reiners argued, would have helped erase that separation: “Certainly, if CLARITY had passed, it would have supercharged the integration of crypto into the financial system.” Gillibrand now finds herself in a crypto-related ethical morass. Her 22-year-old son, Theo, is the head of a start-up backed in part by crypto investors — including one who donates to his mother — that is seeking regulatory approval to bring a crypto-native trading product into conventional financial markets. Her campaign coffers are stuffed with crypto money, while former aides have rotated between her office and the industry. Nate Weisberg reports on one of crypto’s most important Democratic allies and what happens if Gillibrand succeeds in making crypto easier to use and more deeply embedded in ordinary finance: