Is It Buy the Rumor, Sell the News?

Quick Read

• White House adviser Patrick Witt told Bitcoin 2026 that crypto will “take off like a rocket ship” once the CLARITY Act passes.

• Bull predictions for Bitcoin reach as high as $200,000 and $8 for XRP if the CLARITY Act passes, but it all hinges on the Senate Banking Committee scheduling a markup before Memorial Day in May.

• The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks. Get them here FREE.

Last summer, the crypto industry spent months waiting on the GENIUS Act. Every senator’s vote got tracked, every White House comment got dissected, and Bitcoin climbed all the way to $123,000 the week of the signing. When Trump signed it on July 18, 2025, the total crypto market cap crossed $4 trillion for the first time, and the wait was worth it.

Nine months later, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) is back at $77,000, with the CLARITY Act stuck in the Senate. Now, the White House is making the same promise regarding the new bill. Patrick Witt, the President’s top crypto adviser, said at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas that once the CLARITY Act passes, crypto will “take off like a rocket ship.”

Will the CLARITY Act become another buy the rumour, sell the news case when it finally passes?

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Inside the White House’s CLARITY Act “Rocket Ship” Promise

The “rocket ship” line wasn’t off-the-cuff. Witt was on a panel literally titled “Are We Getting More Clarity?” alongside Senator Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets. Witt told the room that once the CLARITY Act is signed, “this industry is going to take off like a rocket ship.” Lummis followed it up with the clearest commitment yet on the timing: “We are going to mark up the Clarity Act in May. We are going to get it to the finish line.”

However, the bill is a long way from where those promises make it sound. The CLARITY Act, which would set federal rules for which crypto assets are commodities and which are securities, passed the House in July 2025, but it’s been stuck in the Senate Banking Committee since.

A January markup—the committee vote that has to happen before the bill can move to the full Senate—got postponed over a fight about stablecoin yield. With the Senate heading into recess, the earliest the Banking Committee can schedule one is the week of May 11. Lummis says if it doesn’t pass this year, the next chance won’t come until 2030.

Over 120 crypto firms signed a joint letter calling for the markup, but the only thing that actually moves the bill is a date on the calendar. So the rocket ship promise stands—but only if the markup actually happens before Memorial Day on May 21.

Why Some Traders Are Calling This a Sell-the-News Setup

Even if the markup happens and the bill passes, the price reaction is a separate question. Crypto trader Aaron Dishner, known as MooninPapa, has been telling his X followers for weeks that the CLARITY Act could be the next big sell-the-news event.

His argument is that by the time the bill actually passes, the rally will already have happened in the price. JPMorgan has called the CLARITY Act a “positive catalyst,” and the bullish chatter on X has only grown louder. But for traders like MooninPapa, when everyone’s already expecting the rally, there’s no one left to buy the actual news.

Look at what happened with the spot Bitcoin ETF in January 2024. Bitcoin nearly doubled in three months on rumors of approval, peaking at over $49,000 the day after the SEC signed off on January 10, 2024. Then the news actually arrived and BTC went the other way—the price dropped 16% within two weeks.

The ETFs themselves became a long-term success, with over $55 billion in cumulative inflows since launch, but right after approval, the price action was textbook sell-the-news.

The setup heading into the CLARITY Act vote looks a lot like that. Most major analyst price targets are already in the $140K-$170K range, and they all assume the bill passes. So if the rumor side of the trade has already played out, what’s left for the news to deliver?

But the GENIUS Act Sent Bitcoin to All-Time Highs

When Trump signed the GENIUS Act on July 18, 2025, the total crypto market cap crossed $4 trillion for the first time. Bitcoin had peaked at $123,000 the week of signing, and instead of reversing afterward, BTC kept climbing into October. XRP also set a seven-year high of $3.65 on the signing day itself. The October crash that followed had nothing to do with GENIUS—it was triggered by Trump’s surprise tariff threat against China on October 10.

The Genius Act was actually a stablecoin bill, and Bitcoin wasn’t really the subject of the law. Bitcoin holders weren’t betting on the GENIUS Act specifically. They saw it as the first crypto bill, with the CLARITY Act lined up behind it. The rally held because the market read GENIUS as the start of more crypto laws to come, and Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal all moved faster on their stablecoin plans once the law passed.

The CLARITY Act looks a lot more like the GENIUS Act than the ETF approval. The spot ETF was a Bitcoin-only event. The CLARITY Act covers everything from token classifications to DeFi rules. So the question heading into a CLARITY Act vote is which precedent fits: the ETF approval that traders sold once the news arrived, or the GENIUS Act, where markets kept rallying after passage.

What the CLARITY Act Could Actually Unlock for Crypto

The CLARITY Act will unlock something specific. Right now, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds—institutions managing trillions of dollars combined—can’t legally hold most crypto assets because their compliance teams won’t sign off without federal classification. The bill will provide exactly that.

On top of that, the bill will kill SAB 121, an SEC accounting rule that made bank custody so expensive it wasn’t worth doing. With that gone, banks can finally custody Bitcoin, XRP, and other major tokens at scale.

For Bitcoin, the bull predictions tied to the bill’s passage are big. Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz expects BTC to hit $90,000 in Q2 if Trump signs the bill in June. Kevin O’Leary’s range is $150,000-$200,000, based on what he says are conversations with sovereign wealth funds waiting on the legal green light.

For XRP, Standard Chartered has an $8 target if the CLARITY Act passes—roughly five times where XRP trades today. All those predictions assume the bill actually gets to a vote.

Banking Committee chair Tim Scott still hasn’t put the CLARITY Act on his calendar. If the markup doesn’t get scheduled before Memorial Day, the bill’s chances will drop again. So heading into May, Witt’s rocket ship promise matters less than a single procedural decision on Tim Scott’s desk.

Should You Believe the Rocket Ship Promise?

The market doesn’t believe Witt yet. Polymarket traders currently give the CLARITY Act 48% odds of being signed into law in 2026—down from 64% just two weeks ago. The bullish targets only matter if the bill passes, and right now, the people putting real money on this give it worse than coin-flip odds.

That said, what could flip the odds is only one thing: the bill getting a markup date. If Tim Scott schedules the markup before Memorial Day and it clears the committee, the GENIUS-style rally setup becomes something to talk about. So unless Tim Scott moves on the markup, the rocket ship narrative is just another political promise the market shrugs off.

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