BitGo’s chief executive has warned that the US Senate’s failure to advance the CLARITY Act leaves American capital markets exposed to a concentrated failure he believes could prove more damaging than the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Mike Belshe made the argument at Korea Blockchain Week 2026, weeks after the Senate declined to move the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, H.R. 3633.
On September 15, 2026, senators voted on cloture for the motion to proceed. Support fell short of the 60 votes required to open debate, so the bill never reached amendment or a final-passage vote.
Reuters reported the tally as 50–49 in favor, roughly ten votes shy of the threshold, with four Republicans joining Democrats in opposition.
A procedural switch by one senator preserved the option of bringing the measure back, but the vote effectively froze the legislation ahead of the election recess.
The House had already passed its version, and the Senate Banking Committee had advanced the text earlier in the year.
What failed on the floor was permission to begin consideration.
Belshe said BitGo had backed the bill and wanted it enacted. In his account, the stalled measure removed a legislative path toward separating core functions in digital-asset markets.
Without that structure, a single firm can still combine an exchange, a brokerage, and custody.
He described that combination as the market’s emerging default shape and pointed to platforms stacking a trading venue with futures-commission and derivatives-clearing permissions as evidence that the one-stop model is already taking hold.
Market rules meant to limit the risks of that concentration, he argued, have not kept pace with the business model.
He divided the danger into custody risk and counterparty credit risk.
Exchanges, he said, have never held custody of anything in the traditional model.
Digital assets are different because control sits in private keys, and a lost or compromised key can mean the tokens are gone for good.
If that failure hit a firm that also ran the trading venue and the brokerage, he argued, the loss would not stay inside the company.
The whole market would go down with it.
Custody, in that setup, is not a back-office service sitting beside the market. It is part of the same point of failure.
The Lehman comparison targeted the credit side of the same structure. Belshe said the broker-dealer failed in 2008 in part because it could not see its own exposures, yet the wider financial system survived the shock.
An integrated digital asset venue would be a different event.
He asked listeners to imagine the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) offering those same bundled services and then collapsing.
The 2008 crisis was devastating, he said, and the system got through it. He was not sure it would have survived if the exchange itself had gone down.
The comparison is an assessment of concentration risk, not a prediction that a named firm is about to fail.
His broader point is that separating trading, brokerage, and safekeeping creates checks that are harder to keep once all three sit in one operational stack and one balance sheet.
Absent a statute drawing those lines, integrated platforms can keep expanding, and supervisors have fewer clear tools to force a split.
Political disagreement over the bill, in his view, is what left markets without a formal limit on that risk.
Belshe separated his own firm’s outlook from the wider effect.
BitGo, built around custody infrastructure and already operating under scrutiny for more than a decade, can continue without the law, he said.
Uncertainty is a different problem for banks and other regulated firms, which he said are moving more slowly because they lack a stable boundary before expanding further into digital assets.
The warning treats the stalled act as more than a delayed industry wish list: the missing rules are what would have constrained one-stop platforms before a custody or credit failure at a central venue could spread through the market.