Coinbase is not treating next week’s U.S. Senate cloture vote as the only route to launching new digital-asset products for American customers. In an interview taped at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia & Tech Conference and published on September 11, 2026, the exchange’s Chief Financial Officer Alesia Haas told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi that Coinbase has a fallback plan anchored in agency rulemaking if the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, commonly known as the CLARITY Act, does not clear Congress. Yahoo Finance disclosed at the top of the segment that it has a business partnership with Coinbase.
The Yahoo Finance write-up went live at 9:34 a.m. Mountain Standard Time (MST) on September 11, followed by a companion video posted at 11:09 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), according to the outlet’s coverage. Haas spoke as Coinbase’s finance chief, addressing investors at a Wall Street conference, tying the exchange’s product ambitions directly to a regulatory outcome ahead of the September 15 vote.
Three paths, not one
Asked how Coinbase would respond if the Senate did not advance the market-structure bill, Haas outlined a broader map than the one that has dominated recent policy coverage.
“There was always three paths to getting Clarity,” Haas said. “There was Congress, there were the agencies themselves, or there was the court system.”
She then walked through the second of those routes in detail.
“So if Clarity doesn’t pass by Congress, we believe that we have a path via the SEC and the CFTC,” Haas said. “Both Chair Selig [CFTC] and Atkins [SEC] have been incredibly innovative in trying to drive forward change in rulemaking at the agency level. And so we believe we’ll be able to offer new products and services via the agencies.”
Coinbase President and COO Emilie Choi, who sat alongside Haas for the interview, said a legislative miss would not force the company to shrink its product plans.
“We never have to roll back our ambitions,” Choi said. “We have started from the beginning with a sense of leaning into regulation and compliance. We know how to launch these products.”
Choi framed the bill’s real effect on Coinbase as one of pace rather than possibility.
“I think it’s more about the acceleration of adoption and how quickly money comes off the sidelines for Clarity,” she said.
What the September 15 vote actually decides
The Senate vote next week is not a final passage vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) filed cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 on August 8, and under Senate procedure, that motion ripens at 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 15, 2026. Cloture requires 60 votes to end debate and allow the chamber to formally take up the bill.
The measure is tracked in Congress as H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The House of Representatives passed its version by a 294-134 vote in July 2025.
The Crypto Times previously reported that Coinbase Chief Policy Officer (CPO) Faryar Shirzad identified September 15 as the first firm procedural date after the Senate departed for its August recess without a floor vote, in an interview with Fox Business.
Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, meaning cloture will require Democratic or independent support to reach 60. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt warned on September 10 that a failed vote would not repeal the House-passed bill, but would stall floor consideration and could push the next realistic window past the 2026 midterm elections.
Yahoo Finance separately cited Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), Chair of the Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee, warning that if market-structure legislation fails in the current Congress, the next serious opportunity may not arrive until 2030.
Coinbase has said this before. Haas made it operational.
The CFO’s comments extend, rather than depart from, a line Coinbase Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Brian Armstrong drew publicly in August. On August 21, 2026, Armstrong wrote on X that “clarity is coming either way,” listing two routes: 60-plus Senate votes on September 15, or a new set of rules from the CFTC and SEC around September 16.
What was new on Friday was the audience and the job title. Haas spoke to institutional investors at a Goldman Sachs conference and tied the agency route directly to Coinbase’s ability to ship new products in the United States. The product argument has been Coinbase’s throughline all year. In July 2026, Shirzad told Fox Business that CLARITY was the statute needed to let Coinbase offer tokenized equities, payments and related services to U.S. customers as part of its “Everything Exchange” plan.
Agency rules can move faster than a statute, but they can also be rewritten by a later commission. Armstrong made that distinction in August, and it still applies to the backup plan Haas described on Friday.
The agencies Coinbase is pointing to
Haas named CFTC Chairman Michael Selig and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. On August 20, 2026, Selig said the CFTC would use its existing authority to begin building a crypto-asset market regime if the CLARITY Act continued to stall, including a possible “crypto asset market” designation for certain venues modeled on the agency’s Designated Contract Market (DCM) category.
Atkins has separately said the SEC’s proposed crypto framework, known as Regulation Crypto Assets, is designed to line up with the CLARITY Act if Congress sends the bill to the president.
Haas’s third path, the courts, is the route Coinbase has used in prior disputes with the SEC. She did not describe any new litigation on Friday.
The bill is still being rewritten in public
The Haas interview landed on the same day Senate Republicans circulated revised CLARITY text. On September 11, 2026, Lummis released an updated substitute that adds CFTC registration and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance for non-decentralized trading protocols, while leaving the ethics and stablecoin-yield provisions unchanged from the earlier draft.
That timing matters. Coinbase is telling investors it can work through the agencies if Congress does not finish, even as lawmakers are still adjusting the statutory text four days before the cloture vote. Lummis has also argued in recent days that the bill would require qualified custodians and segregated customer funds in response to past exchange failures.
What to watch next
The immediate calendar is short. The Senate cloture vote on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 is scheduled for 2:15 p.m. ET on September 15, 2026. If cloture fails, the bill stays on the Senate calendar, but floor consideration stalls. If cloture succeeds, debate and amendments follow, and a later cloture test would still be needed on the bill itself before a final passage vote.
Whether Coinbase’s backup plan holds up in practice will depend on how far Selig and Atkins are willing, and legally able, to move without legislation, and on whether the next set of commissioners chooses to keep those rules in place.
Also Read: Lummis: CLARITY Act Shields Tether-Style Stablecoin Freezes
