The CLARITY Act is one vote away from giving XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) the thing its holders have wanted for years: a federal law that settles XRP’s legal status for good. But the catch is the timing. The Senate has only a few weeks of floor time before the midterms take over the calendar, so the bill either clears soon or stalls for possibly years.
That sets up the question every XRP holder is really asking. If the bill passes in that window, where does the price go from around $1.13 today by the end of the year?
Why the Senate’s August Recess Is the Clock on the CLARITY Act
The CLARITY Act has come a long way, which is why the next few weeks matter so much. The bill—which would lock XRP’s status as a commodity into federal law and hand most crypto oversight to the CFTC—cleared the Senate Banking Committee on a 15-9 vote on May 14. On June 1 it reached the Senate’s floor calendar, which makes it eligible for a full vote.
However, the calendar is also what stands in its way. The Senate sits for only the first week of August before leaving for a recess that runs until September 14. After that, an election year eats most of the remaining floor time, with senators home campaigning through the fall. Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno, two of crypto’s biggest backers in Congress, have warned that if this window closes, the next real shot at market-structure law could slip toward the end of the decade.
Moreover, there’s still work to do before any floor vote happens. The Banking Committee’s version has to be merged with a separate version from the Agriculture Committee, and the combined bill then needs 60 votes to pass. Merging the two is the easy part, but getting to 60 is where the real fight is, and it comes down to a single clause.
The One Clause Standing Between XRP and a Senate Vote
The bill isn’t held up by XRP, or even by crypto trading. It’s held up by one provision, known as Section 604, over how the law should treat the people who build crypto software.
The clause protects software developers and infrastructure builders who never hold anyone’s funds from being regulated like banks or exchanges. Write code that other people use to move crypto, and you wouldn’t be on the hook the way a company holding customer money is.
Law enforcement groups say the protection is written so broadly it would kneecap their ability to prosecute crypto crime, while developers say that without it, building anything on a blockchain in the U.S. turns into a legal minefield. On June 11, administration officials brought law enforcement groups into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to hash it out, a meeting that drew House Majority Whip Tom Emmer and the administration’s crypto lead David Sacks.
That clause decides the vote count. Republicans can’t pass the bill alone, so they need at least seven Democrats to reach 60. Two of the likeliest, Mark Warner and Catherine Cortez Masto, have said their vote depends on law enforcement’s concerns being settled. So whether the bill passes before August comes down to whether that White House meeting produced language those two can accept, something the next round of negotiations will reveal.
Why CLARITY Matters So Much for the XRP Price
This bill could move the XRP price more than any other catalyst because the biggest buyers have said out loud they’re waiting for it. XRP has been trading at a discount, because institutions still treat it as a legal question mark.
The proof is in who’s been buying and who hasn’t. Retail-sized ETF demand has been enough to defend the XRP price but not to break it higher, because a wall of roughly 1.16 billion XRP waits at the $1.45 break-even zone, where buyers from last cycle want to get out flat.
The buyers who could punch through it are the big institutions, the pension funds and asset managers, and they would remain on the sidelines until the law is settled. Standard Chartered has estimated XRP ETFs could attract $4 billion to $8 billion in their first year if the bill passes, which is three to six times the roughly $1.44 billion they have pulled in since launching. And JPMorgan has published the same range under the same condition.
That said, there’s still a complication: some of that move may already be in the price, because the market has watched this bill advance for months. So the real question isn’t whether clarity helps XRP, but how much of the waiting money actually moves once the bill is law, and how much already has.
Where Could the XRP Price Trade by Q4 2026?
Analyst targets for XRP in 2026 run from under a dollar to well into double digits, a range too wide to be worth anything, so we would rather work it out from where XRP trades now and what would actually have to happen.
Bearish Prediction
If the Section 604 talks stall and no vote happens before August, the catalyst holding up the price would likely fade. Fear of a multi-year delay would probably creep in, the break-even sellers would keep capping any bounce, and XRP could drift back toward its lows for the year. In that case we would expect the $0.80 to $1.00 zone to come back into play, with the door open to lower if the broader market stays weak.
Base Prediction
If a compromise on Section 604 comes together and the bill clears around late July or early August, clarity would start to remove the legal discount, and the $1.45 break-even wall could give way on rising volume.
We think a re-rating into the $1.60 to $2.20 range would be realistic by Q4 for XRP. What keeps it from running further is history: when the SEC case settled in August 2025, XRP had already peaked a month earlier and long-term holders used the news as an exit, a reminder that key catalysts often arrive already priced in.
Bullish Prediction
The strongest case needs more than the vote. If the CLARITY Act passes, ETF inflows reaccelerate toward Standard Chartered’s billions projection, and the Fed starts easing into the autumn, the money waiting on the sidelines would finally overwhelm the sellers at break-even.
That is the case for XRP retesting the $2.50 to $3.50 area, still short of the old $3.65 high, and it is the one scenario we would want confirmed by actual inflows before leaning on it.
What XRP Holders Should Watch Between Now and August
Where XRP ends up in Q4 traces back to one thing this summer: whether Section 604 gets rewritten in a way that wins over enough Democrats before the Senate goes home. Those votes are the hardest part of getting to 60, and Warner and Cortez Masto are the ones to watch.
So, there’s three key things to watch out for. First, any sign that law enforcement has gone neutral on the new Section 604 language, which is the domino that moves the senators. Second, an actual floor vote scheduled on the calendar, not just promised. Third, the merged Banking and Agriculture text appearing, which is the last step before a vote. Those would shape how the XRP price reacts in the coming months.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks