Polymarket prices “Clarity Act signed into law in 2026?” at 37.5¢ on the YES side — a 37.5% market-implied probability — but a two-path legislative model built from the Senate’s remaining calendar and the cloture math puts the true number closer to 22%, which makes NO at 63¢ the value side by roughly 15 percentage points.
The single most important input arrived on July 23, 2026, when Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters the bill will miss the August 7 window industry negotiators had been targeting (CoinDesk). That comment knocked the contract from 45.5¢ to a 31.5¢ intraday low inside 36 hours. This Deep Dive walks the math, steelmans the case for YES, and sets out what would flip the read.
The Bet at a Glance:
• Market: “Clarity Act signed into law in 2026?” — resolves YES only if H.R.3633 passes both chambers and is signed by December 31, 2026, 11:59pm ET (Polymarket, resolution source Congress.gov)
• Price: YES 37.5¢ mid (37¢ bid / 38¢ ask) = 37.5% implied; NO 62.5¢ mid, 63¢ executable ask = 63% implied — Polymarket snapshot, July 24, 2026, 06:20 UTC
• Our estimate: 22% YES / 78% NO — two-path legislative decomposition, July 24, 2026
• Edge: +15pp on NO at the 63¢ ask (78% estimate vs 63% implied) — our model
• Liquidity: $2,488,860 lifetime volume, $167,170 in the last 24 hours, $53,248 resting liquidity, 1¢ spread — Polymarket
• Catalyst / date: August 7, 2026, the Senate’s last session day before summer recess; then roughly three September weeks before the November midterms — CoinDesk
• Disconfirmation: seven or more Senate Democrats publicly committing to cloture before recess — currently two are on record
Methodology: how we built the 22%
The estimate is a decomposition, not a poll. We split the path to law into two windows — a pre-midterm window running to the end of September, and a post-election lame-duck window from mid-November to December 31 — and assigned each a probability of reaching a cloture vote and of clearing 60 votes once there. Those are multiplied, then multiplied again by the probability the House re-passes the merged Senate text and the President signs it inside the calendar.
Inputs are the public vote record (House 294–134, Senate Banking 15–9), the seat count (53 Republicans against a 60-vote cloture threshold), the number of Democrats on record supporting floor consideration, the Senate’s stated floor priorities for the coming week, and dated statements from Senate leadership and the White House. The caveats matter: two of the four conditional probabilities are judgement calls with no clean base rate, lame-duck behaviour is hard to model, and a single leadership decision can move the whole chain. Treat 22% as a central estimate with wide error bars.
The market, the price, and the liquidity
The contract is narrow and unusually well specified. It resolves YES only if the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (H.R.3633) is passed by both chambers and signed into law by December 31, 2026. The primary resolution source is the Congress.gov legislation tracker, which removes most of the ambiguity that plagues political contracts — there is no interpretive wiggle room about what “passed” means.
On Polymarket, the YES side sits at 37.5¢ mid with a 37¢ bid and a 38¢ ask as of 06:20 UTC on July 24, 2026. Because prediction-market prices are quoted in cents that read directly as probabilities, that is a 37.5% market-implied chance. The NO side is the mirror at 62.5¢ mid, with the executable ask at 63¢. Polymarket’s YES and NO prices sum to exactly 100 cents, so unlike a sportsbook there is no vig to strip out; the only friction is the 1¢ spread, and we price the edge off the 63¢ ask rather than the 62.5¢ mid so the number is the one a trader could actually get.
Liquidity is real but not deep. Lifetime volume is $2,488,860, with $167,170 turning over in the last 24 hours and $53,248 of resting liquidity in the book — enough to make the price informative, but thin enough that a single headline moves it several points, which is exactly what the last 72 hours demonstrated.
Is NO at 63¢ value? On our numbers, yes, by a meaningful margin. The market is pricing a 37.5% chance that a 616-page financial-regulation bill clears a 60-vote threshold it has never been tested against, gets House concurrence on newly merged text, and reaches the President’s desk — all inside a calendar that the Senate Majority Leader has just said cannot accommodate it before August 7. Our decomposition puts that chain at 22%. The gap is 15 percentage points at the ask, which is wide enough to survive reasonable disagreement about any single conditional probability in the model. It is not a costless position: NO ties up 63¢ to win 37¢, a 0.59-to-1 payout, so the read has to be right roughly 63% of the time simply to break even. We think it is right closer to 78% of the time, and the margin is the edge.
| Side | Market price | Implied prob | Our estimate | Edge (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO | 62.5¢ mid / 63¢ ask | 62.5% / 63% | 78% | +15.5 / +15 |
| YES | 37.5¢ mid / 38¢ ask | 37.5% / 38% | 22% | −15.5 / −16 |
Sources: Polymarket order book snapshot, July 24, 2026, 06:20 UTC; our two-path legislative model. No de-vig applied — Polymarket’s binary prices sum to 100¢; the 1¢ spread is the only friction.
“I would like to at least get Clarity started. We’ll see where the votes are.”
— John Thune, Senate Majority Leader, United States Senate
(CoinDesk, July 23, 2026)
The case for NO: the calendar and the cloture math
Two hard constraints drive the estimate, and neither is a matter of opinion.
The first is arithmetic. Republicans hold 53 seats. Cloture requires 60. Even assuming every Republican votes to proceed — not a safe assumption on a bill this large — the coalition needs seven Democrats. Two are publicly on record supporting floor consideration: Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks. Getting from two to seven is not a rounding error; it is a five-vote swing among senators who have spent months conditioning support on ethics language. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, among the chamber’s most crypto-friendly Democrats, has said publicly that enforceable language covering government officials’ crypto holdings is a prerequisite for her floor support. When the most sympathetic Democrat is still a conditional yes, the marginal five are further away than the “one clause from passing” framing suggests.
The second is the calendar. August 7 is the Senate’s last session day before summer recess. Thune has now indicated the bill will miss it, and the chamber is expected to prioritise a bipartisan Russia sanctions and tariffs package in the intervening week. After recess, lawmakers return for roughly three weeks in September before the November midterms consume the political oxygen. A 616-page bill — the merged Banking and Agriculture drafts added more than 70 pages of new language — needs floor time for amendments, not just a single vote. Three pre-election weeks is a tight fit for a bill that has already slipped two deadlines.
Brian Gardner, chief Washington policy strategist at Stifel, framed the timing risk plainly before the latest slip, writing that the bill “probably needs to get through the Senate by the end of July” and that missing that window would cause its prospects to “deteriorate materially” (Coinspeaker, July 6, 2026). Beacon Policy Advisors has been blunter still, characterising a miss as potentially ending the 2026 path entirely.
A third dispute gets less attention than ethics but is structurally harder: Section 604, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act provision on non-custodial developer protections that law-enforcement voices have resisted, plus the unresolved question of whether platforms can offer interest-equivalent stablecoin yields outside the GENIUS Act’s prohibitions. Ethics is the loudest fight. Solving it does not automatically deliver the other two.
The case against NO: why the market might be right
The steelman for YES is genuine, and it starts with the fact that this bill has already cleared harder-looking hurdles than people expected. The House passed it 294–134 on July 17, 2025 — a margin that included a substantial bloc of Democrats. Senate Banking reported it 15–9 on May 14, 2026, a bipartisan committee vote. On June 1, 2026 it was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders as Calendar No. 423, meaning it is formally eligible for floor consideration at any time the leader chooses. Bills that die usually die in committee. This one is past that stage.
The ethics logjam also genuinely moved. On July 21 and 22, 2026, the White House signalled that President Trump would accept ethics language barring senior federal officials from issuing crypto or digital assets — the single provision Democrats had made a precondition (CoinDesk). The market’s reaction was immediate and large: the YES contract jumped from 37.5¢ to 45.5¢ in a day. That is the shape of a real catalyst, not noise. If the White House converts that signal into text Democrats will sign, the vote count can move faster than a static count implies — floor coalitions on financial legislation tend to assemble in a rush once the blocking issue clears, not gradually.
Our model’s weakest joint is the lame duck. We assign a 45% chance the bill is taken up between mid-November and December 31, and a 35% chance it clears cloture if so. Both are defensible and both are judgement calls. Post-election sessions have historically been where bipartisan bills that ran out of runway actually pass, because retiring and defeated members vote more freely once ballots are counted. If the true lame-duck numbers are 60% and 50%, the overall estimate rises to roughly 30% and most of the edge evaporates. That possibility deserves to be held honestly rather than argued away.
The market may also hold information we do not. With $2.49m of lifetime volume, this contract attracts people who read markup text and talk to staffers; a persistent 37.5¢ may be pricing a whip count that has not reached public reporting.
“There’s that first week of August that the Senate is in session. So I wouldn’t count it out.”
— Patrick Witt, White House crypto adviser
(CoinDesk, July 23, 2026)
How the price has moved, and what moved it
The last month is a record of the market repricing on news rather than drifting. The contract opened the window at 44.5¢ on June 25, spiked to a monthly high of 53¢ on July 5 as merged-text reports circulated, then bled through mid-July as each deadline slipped. The two most recent moves are the informative ones.
| Date (2026) | YES price | Implied prob | What moved it |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 25 | 44.5¢ | 44.5% | Pre-July 4 target optimism |
| July 5 | 53.0¢ | 53.0% | Monthly high; merged-text reports |
| July 21 | 37.5¢ | 37.5% | Ethics impasse, no Democratic movement |
| July 22 | 45.5¢ | 45.5% | White House signals ethics acceptance |
| July 23 | 38.5¢ | 38.5% | Thune: bill misses the August 7 window |
| July 24 | 31.5¢ low, 37.5¢ now | 31.5% / 37.5% | Overnight flush, partial retrace |
Source: Polymarket daily price history for the YES token, June 25 – July 24, 2026, retrieved 06:20 UTC.
Does the price action support the NO read? Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. The July 22 spike to 45.5¢ says the market treats the ethics deal as a genuine unlock, which cuts against a hard NO thesis. The July 23–24 collapse to 31.5¢ says it treats the leader’s calendar comment as the heavier fact. The bounce back to 37.5¢ within hours says neither view has won. What the sequence does establish is that this contract is headline-reactive on thin liquidity, so the current price is closer to a running average of the last two press cycles than a settled judgement. That is the environment where a slower structural read — seat counts and session days, which do not change with the news cycle — has the best chance of being worth more than the tape.
Where this bet breaks
The lean on NO at 63¢ rests on assumptions that could fail. It breaks if any of these fire:
- Five more Senate Democrats go on record before recess. The model’s binding constraint is the gap between two public Democratic supporters and the seven needed for cloture. Named commitments from the Gillibrand-adjacent bloc would invalidate the core input, not merely soften it — the cloture probability in both windows would need to be revised sharply upward.
- Thune files cloture and schedules floor time in the first week of August. Patrick Witt explicitly flagged that week. If the leader converts “we’ll see where the votes are” into a scheduled vote, the pre-recess path we priced at 30% is live again at a much higher number.
- The price moves through 55¢ on YES. Above that level the market is pricing something our public inputs do not contain — almost certainly a whip count. The 15pp edge is gone entirely if NO trades below 45¢, and a sustained move there is a signal to stop arguing with the market.
- Section 604 and the stablecoin-yield disputes are settled in the released text. If all three fights are resolved rather than one, the remaining obstacle is purely floor time.
What to watch
Three dates and one level. The week of July 27, when the Senate takes up the Russia sanctions and tariffs package, is the first real test of Thune’s “get it started” language. August 7 is the last session day before recess — with no cloture filing by then, the pre-midterm path narrows to September alone. Mid-September is the last chance for passage that is not a lame-duck story.
On the tape, watch the 55¢ level on YES. The contract traded above it once this month, on July 5, and failed to hold. A sustained break above it while public reporting still shows two Democratic commitments would be evidence the market knows something the record does not. For context on how these political contracts have priced elsewhere, see our reads on the 2026 Senate control market and the government shutdown contract, both of which turned on the same calendar-versus-headline tension.
TL;DR
Polymarket’s “Clarity Act signed into law in 2026?” contract has YES at 37.5¢ (37.5% implied) and NO at 63¢ at the ask (63% implied). Our two-path model — a compressed September window and a lame-duck window, each gated by a 60-vote cloture threshold the coalition is five Democrats short of — puts the true probability of passage at 22%, making NO the value side by about 15 percentage points. The read breaks if five more Senate Democrats commit publicly before recess, or if Majority Leader Thune files cloture in the first week of August.
FAQ
What are the current Clarity Act odds on Polymarket?
As of 06:20 UTC on July 24, 2026, the “Clarity Act signed into law in 2026?” market has YES at 37.5¢ mid — a 37¢ bid and a 38¢ ask — and NO at 62.5¢ mid with a 63¢ ask. In prediction markets the cents read directly as a probability, so the market is pricing roughly a 37.5% chance the bill is signed into law by December 31, 2026. The contract has $2,488,860 in lifetime volume and $167,170 traded in the last 24 hours.
Is NO at 63¢ value?
On our estimate, yes. We model the true probability of passage at 22%, which implies a fair NO price near 78¢ rather than 63¢ — an edge of about 15 percentage points. The two constraints doing most of the work are the cloture arithmetic (53 Republican seats against a 60-vote threshold, with two Democrats publicly on record) and a Senate calendar that the Majority Leader has said cannot fit the bill before the August 7 recess. Both are public, checkable facts rather than forecasts.
Why did the price jump on July 22 and fall on July 23?
On July 21 and 22 the White House signalled that President Trump would accept ethics language barring senior federal officials from issuing digital assets — the provision Democrats had made a precondition for floor support — and the contract rose from 37.5¢ to 45.5¢. On July 23, Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated the bill would miss the August 7 window, and the price fell to 38.5¢, then to a 31.5¢ intraday low before retracing.
How many votes does the Clarity Act need in the Senate?
Sixty, to clear cloture. Republicans hold 53 seats, so at least seven Democrats are required even if every Republican votes to proceed. Two Democrats — Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks — are publicly on record supporting floor consideration. The bill has already passed the House 294–134 (July 17, 2025) and cleared Senate Banking 15–9 (May 14, 2026).
What would change this analysis?
Five more Senate Democrats going on record before recess, a cloture filing during the first week of August, resolution of the Section 604 developer-protection and stablecoin-yield disputes in the released text, or a sustained move above 55¢ on YES. Any one of those would require revising the 22% estimate upward; the last would suggest the market is pricing whip-count information that is not yet public.
Does missing 2026 kill the bill entirely?
Not formally, but the delay is long. Senator Cynthia Lummis has warned that a missed 2026 vote could push realistic passage to at least 2030. That asymmetry — a narrow window now against a multi-year gap after — is part of why the contract stays headline-reactive. For related reads, see our coverage of North Carolina’s move to tax prediction-market contracts and the Greenland market’s paperwork problem.
This article is informational analysis only and is not betting or financial advice. Odds and prediction-market prices move constantly; every price quoted is a timestamped snapshot, not a live line. There is no such thing as a risk-free contract — past results and model estimates do not guarantee outcomes. Do your own research.
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