XRP Slides Toward $1 After Senate Punts CLARITY Act Vote to September

XRP is still clinging to the $1 line, but the trade behind it has changed. The Senate's CLARITY Act delay has turned a regulatory bet into a waiting game.

Traders had spent months treating XRP as the coin with the cleanest regulatory payoff in Washington. The CLARITY Act was meant to give exchanges, custodians and token issuers the federal rulebook they've wanted since the SEC sued Ripple in 2020. Then the Senate left town without a vote.

That's the story. Not a chart pattern. Not a mystery.

Investor's Business Daily reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune pushed the vote until after the August recess and said the bill would be prioritized when the Senate returns around Sept. 14. XRP had already tested $1.01 in late June, its lowest level since November 2024, according to Cointelegraph and market data cited by Capital.com. By late July, Capital.com put XRP at $1.11, down about 42% for the year. If you own the token, that is the number that matters more than the slogans around regulatory clarity.

The bill is stuck on politics, not paperwork

The CLARITY Act's problem isn't that lawmakers forgot what crypto is. The problem is that the bill now sits inside two live fights at once.

The first is ethics. The Los Angeles Times reported that Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona were working on a compromise proposal covering President Donald Trump's crypto interests. Senate Banking Committee Democrats have been blunter. In a July 22 statement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren's committee staff said Trump made more than $1.4 billion from crypto ventures in 2025 and argued that the latest bill text leaves major loopholes around World Liberty Financial, memecoin royalties and enforcement.

You don't have to share Warren's politics to see the issue. A president with large crypto-linked income signing the country's main crypto market structure law is not a small optics problem. It's the kind of conflict that gives opponents a simple line of attack, and simple lines of attack slow bills down.

The second fight is stablecoin yield. Barron's reported that some Republicans and community banks are worried about crypto firms offering rewards that look too much like interest on deposits. Banks know exactly what that means. If customers can park cash in a token account and earn yield without calling it a bank deposit, money moves. So does political pressure.

Two fights, one delayed vote, and a market that had priced in a cleaner path.

The ETF bid has gone quiet

The ETF flows show the mood better than the speeches do. U.S. spot XRP ETFs had a strong launch period. The Block reported that Grayscale and Franklin Templeton's XRP funds alone took in a combined $164.1 million on their first trading day in November 2025, while BeInCrypto, citing SoSoValue, put first-month net inflows at $643.92 million.

That was then.

By July, the desk looked very different. Yahoo Finance, citing SoSoValue data, reported that U.S. spot XRP ETFs pulled in only $107,000 on July 10 and that total assets across the seven funds had slipped below $1 billion. BeInCrypto reported that XRP ETF flows were exactly zero on 10 of July's first 17 trading days. That doesn't mean institutions are dumping XRP. It means they aren't adding with conviction while Congress drifts into September.

Frankly, that is worse than a clean selloff in one respect. A selloff gives you a price. Silence gives you a question.

Polymarket has been asking the same question with money. Investor's Business Daily reported that prediction-market odds for the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 fell to 14%, down from 82% in February. Polymarket's own U.S. law page recently showed the market closer to the mid-30s, which is better than panic but still nowhere near the confidence traders had when the bill looked like a near-term catalyst.

XRP has one thing going for it: the $1 level has held. Cointelegraph reported that the token's late-June move to $1.01 left it close to its first break below $1 since November 2024. BeInCrypto put the current trading range around $1.01 to $1.22, with $1.01 acting as the line buyers have defended since late June. That is real support, not just message-board faith.

But support is not the same as a reason to rally.

September now carries more weight than it should. If Thune brings the bill forward and senators settle the ethics and stablecoin language, XRP can reprice quickly because the market already knows the trade. If the date slips again, watch the ETF flow data before the headlines. The money that came in for clarity has already shown how quickly it can stop coming in.

Also read: Coinbase Wins Abu Dhabi License to Build Its Tokenized Stock Hub • Monero's FCMP++ Hard Fork Will Erase Investigators' Last Way to Trace It • SharpLink CEO Says Ethereum Proposal to Burn Staking Yield Threatens 35 Billion Dollars in DeFi

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