Coinbase's Armstrong Says CLARITY Act Will Clear Sept. 15 Senate Vote, Dismisses Dimon's "Regulatory Arbitrage" Attack

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC's Squawk Box Asia on September 10 that he expects the CLARITY Act to survive the Senate's cloture vote scheduled for September 15, arguing the crypto market-structure bill has enough bipartisan support to clear the chamber despite the narrow math working against it.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed in early August, setting up a 2:15 p.m. ET procedural vote that requires 60 votes to succeed. Republicans hold 53 seats, meaning at least seven Democrats or independents need to cross over, and Galaxy Research has put the odds of passage at just 30% given the compressed pre-midterm calendar. Armstrong said in the interview that if the bill fails, he expects the SEC and CFTC to proceed with rulemaking and innovation exemptions on their own.

Much of the interview centered on Armstrong's ongoing public dispute with JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who has attacked the bill's provision letting stablecoin issuers pay yield to holders, calling it regulatory arbitrage that lets crypto firms function like unregulated banks. Dimon told Yahoo Finance he is unhappy with the bill, saying "we'll fight it. If we lose, we lose, and we'll live," and dismissed Armstrong directly: "If he wants to be a bank, be a bank... No one is going to bow down to this guy... He's the only one, and he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington on this thing." Armstrong pushed back on the characterization in the CNBC interview, framing Dimon's opposition as legacy-bank protectionism rather than a genuine financial-stability concern.

Armstrong made the case for the bill against the backdrop of a rough stretch for Coinbase's own stock, which trades around $174.72, down roughly 25% since the start of the year, according to Yahoo Finance data, after the company posted a third consecutive quarterly loss in its Q2 2026 earnings: a $359.5 million net loss as revenue fell to $1.2 billion from $1.5 billion a year earlier, missing Wall Street's $1.3 billion estimate. Coinbase did notch a bright spot in that report, a third straight quarter of trading-market-share gains, now at 10.3%.

Armstrong pointed to the company's agentic-payments push as evidence of diversification beyond trading fees, telling CNBC that more than 165 million agentic payments have now run through x402, the payments protocol Coinbase built on its Base network, with over 90% of that volume settled in USDC on Base itself. Coinbase's own developer documentation puts the x402 total lower, at more than 100 million payments processed across both Base and Solana combined, a figure that has not caught up to Armstrong's on-air number.