Who Bob Diamond Really Means to Win From the CLARITY Act

Former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond recently appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" and named two companies as the infrastructure winners from the CLARITY Act: Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, and Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetual-futures exchange. The headline version of that comment is already circulating: a former top banker has declared which crypto-native firms stand to benefit from federal regulation.

The more revealing detail is the one the headline skips. Diamond is chairman of Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. And his investment fund, Atlas Merchant Capital, invested in Circle in 2021. When he talks about these two companies, he is not speaking as a disinterested observer. He is speaking as a principal.

That does not make his analysis wrong. But it does change how we should read it.

The pitch

Diamond's broader argument on Squawk Box was that the CLARITY Act is "really good for the banks over time", even though much of the banking industry is currently lobbying against it. He pointed to the large institutions already investing in blockchain infrastructure - JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York - and argued that the ones building now will be the ones that benefit later. His language leaned on settlement speed, 24/7 trading, lower cost, and deeper liquidity. These are features of blockchain architecture, not slogans.

The infrastructure thesis is coherent. The CLARITY Act, if it passes, would split oversight of digital assets between the SEC and the CFTC, bringing statutory clarity to a market that has operated for years under regulatory improvisation. It would impose Bank Secrecy Act requirements on digital commodity intermediaries, set a framework for decentralized finance, and restrict crypto platforms from paying savings-account-like yield on passive stablecoin deposits - a provision that banks have been fighting for since the bill's first drafts.

Circle and Hyperliquid sit on different sides of that framework. Circle operates at the payments layer, issuing dollar-pegged stablecoins that move at internet speed. Hyperliquid operates at the trading layer, running its own purpose-built blockchain where perpetual futures and spot trades settle in under a second. One moves money; the other moves bets on what money might become. Both are examples of infrastructure that the CLARITY Act would force into a definable regulatory category for the first time.

But the question is not whether these companies are infrastructure. The question is what kind of infrastructure the CLARITY Act actually protects.

What the bill is still

The CLARITY Act has not passed. It cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May by a 15-to-9 vote. The Senate Agriculture Committee approved its own version earlier this year. The two need to be reconciled, and the result then needs to be reconciled with the House version. Prediction markets on Kalshi gave the bill a 30% chance of becoming law by year-end as of late July. The Senate is heading into recess on August 8, which means the window for a floor vote has essentially closed until mid-September at the earliest.

That timing matters because it shapes how seriously to take any single endorsement. Diamond's comments arrived about a week before the Senate recess, when legislative momentum was already stalled. The banking industry's opposition to the bill centers on the stablecoin yield debate: the Senate Banking Committee's version would treat passive stablecoin yield as a banking activity, meaning crypto platforms offering it would need to meet full banking requirements. The compromise language that cleared committee in May allowed usage-driven rewards - tied to trading, transactions, or staking - but blocked savings-account-style passive yield. That was the version that sent Circle's stock up nearly 20%.

So the constituency map looks something like this: banks oppose the bill because it opens stablecoin issuance to non-bank competitors, even with yield restrictions. Crypto-native issuers like Circle want the bill because it legitimizes their business and carves out the reward structure they actually use. And Diamond, sitting between both worlds, argues that the banks will win anyway - because the ones investing in blockchain now will eventually run it.

Banks, on their own time

That is the part of Diamond's argument worth sitting with. He is not saying banks will embrace crypto platforms. He is saying the banks are already building parallel infrastructure - tokenized funds, settlement layers, private ledgers - and regulatory clarity would simply make that work easier to justify internally. JPMorgan, which Diamond cited, has been running its own Onyx digital-asset platform and participated in a DTCC tokenization pilot announced in July. If the CLARITY Act stalls, the DTCC and the big banks keep working. If it passes, they get a clearer mandate to do what they were already doing.

There is a quiet contradiction here. The same legislation that would legitimize Circle's stablecoin business and Hyperliquid's exchange infrastructure could also accelerate the migration of tokenized finance into traditional institutional wrappers. The CLARITY Act does not choose between decentralized exchanges and bank-controlled tokenization. It could enable both - or it could enable banks to absorb the innovation that decentralized platforms are currently testing.

Diamond seems to think the banks that invest will be the ones that win. That is a defensible view. But it is also a view that benefits the companies he is invested in, regardless of how the bill turns out. If the CLARITY Act passes, his infrastructure thesis plays out and his portfolio gains legitimacy. If it stalls, as JPMorgan analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou warned this week, the tokenization work moves into traditional market infrastructure anyway - and the banks Diamond named as the real winners keep building. Either way, the argument holds.

What to watch

The CLARITY Act is now a mid-September question, not an August one. The substantive fights - stablecoin yield, DeFi classification, CFTC versus SEC jurisdiction - are unlikely to disappear in the recess. What might change is the pressure on senators to compromise, because both banks and crypto firms will spend August sharpening their positions.

I am more interested in what happens after the bill clears - or does not - than in who claims to win today. The structural shift is not about whether the CLARITY Act becomes law. It is about whether the infrastructure that processes trillions in trading volume on permissionless blockchains gets absorbed into a regulatory framework designed around institutions with compliance departments and Senate lobbying budgets. If it does, the system gains clarity but loses the competitive pressure that makes new infrastructure worth building in the first place. If it does not, the innovation keeps running outside the framework, which is exactly where it has been for years.

Either outcome changes who sits between the trader and the settlement layer. That is the question the bill actually asks.