America’s crypto lobby has found its new national holiday: 4 July. At Consensus in Miami, Patrick Witt, now the White House’s main digital-assets point man, said the administration wants the CLARITY Act through by Independence Day. The symbolism is almost too neat. A country born by declaring independence from an empire now wants to declare regulatory independence for an industry that spent a decade pretending Washington did not matter.
The odds have moved with the rhetoric. Polymarket traders now put the chance of the CLARITY Act becoming law this year at roughly 70%, up sharply from last month, helped by reports of a Senate compromise on stablecoin interest payments. But this is still Washington, where legislative certainty is usually just a rumour with a better suit. Galaxy has warned that if Senate markup slips too far beyond May, the odds fall quickly.
The more interesting shift is personnel. David Sacks has left his formal White House AI and crypto czar role after exhausting the 130-day limit for special government employees, although he remains influential through the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Witt, not Sacks, is now the operative figure on crypto legislation. Sacks supplied the Silicon Valley glamour. Witt has the less glamorous but more important job: getting text through committees, reconciling factions, and keeping Congress on schedule.
Then came the line of the week: Kevin Warsh calling Bitcoin the “new gold.” It is a useful soundbite, but a lazy one. Gold sits in vaults. Bitcoin consumes, stores and transmits energy through proof-of-work. Rosa & Roubini’s own valuation work argues that Bitcoin should be understood not merely as digital scarcity, but as a form of digital energy storage, with its value anchored partly in the real-world electricity required to secure and produce each coin. Their energy-based models put fair value well above recent market levels, while the Power Law framework suggests Bitcoin is still moving within a long-term adoption channel rather than a simple scarcity fairy tale.
That distinction matters. If Bitcoin is “new gold,” it is a passive reserve asset. If Bitcoin is stored energy, it is something stranger: monetary infrastructure linked to power grids, mining economics, dollar liquidity and sovereign strategy. That is why the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is not just another Trump-era flourish. Witt has said legislation should follow the executive order, with proposals in Congress contemplating the purchase of up to one million bitcoin over five years.
So the week’s story is not simply that crypto is rallying again. It is that Bitcoin is being reclassified in real time: from speculative token, to macro asset, to reserve instrument, to energy-backed strategic infrastructure. Gold had central banks. Bitcoin wants Congress.
