When President Trump potentially signs the CLARITY Act, four tokens that have spent a decade under SEC scrutiny could get a permanent legal shield that no future administration can remove without an act of Congress. Those tokens are XRP, ADA, HBAR, XLM, according to an expert.
“The difference between guidance and federal law is the difference between a memo and a contract,” as one analyst framing the situation put it. The CLARITY Act writes the commodity classification permanently into federal statute and moves jurisdiction over these four networks from the SEC to the CFTC, the same agency that regulates oil, gold, and wheat.
A future SEC chair can reverse it on their first day in office. Federal law is a contract. Undoing it requires the full legislative process.
What Changes for Each Token
Cardano (ADA) has been bleeding for two years while other coins ran. The SEC named ADA directly in its 2023 lawsuit against Coinbase, forcing every exchange, institution, and fund manager to keep their distance. That fear ends the moment Trump signs. Grayscale has already filed for a spot ADA ETF. Proof-of-stake staking rewards, which the SEC previously argued could constitute securities, are explicitly protected under the new rules.
Hedera (HBAR) is arguably the most institutionally ready. Google, IBM, FedEx, and McLaren sit on the Hedera Governing Council. A spot HBAR ETF from Canary Capital is already live on NASDAQ. The CLARITY Act removes the last remaining concern for Council members: that a future SEC chair could classify their Hedera-based activities as securities offerings. The day it passes, pilots become production businesses.
What Changes for XRP and XLM
XRP’s legal journey is the most documented in crypto history. Ripple spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the SEC lawsuit that defined the regulatory environment for the entire industry. The court ruling that XRP secondary market sales are not securities was a landmark moment. But a court ruling can be relitigated. A federal statute cannot be reversed by a new SEC chair or a new lawsuit.
XLM, the native token of the Stellar network, shares a similar institutional payments thesis to XRP and has faced the same category of regulatory uncertainty that kept institutional capital cautious. The commodity classification under CLARITY resolves that uncertainty with the same permanence.
The Permanent Nature of This
Every Ripple court date. Every Cardano enforcement threat. Every time these networks watched competitors run while regulatory uncertainty kept institutional capital away. All of it gets buried under one piece of federal law.
The Senate Banking Committee has already advanced the bill. The July 4 target is real. And for four networks that have spent a decade fighting for the legal clarity that should have existed from the beginning, the end of that fight is closer than it has ever been.
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