Republicans in the US Senate have released a revised, 630-page version of the Clarity Act. The first vote on the bill follows five days later, on September 15. According to Politico, the bill still lacks support from Democrats, whose votes would be decisive for passage.
The Clarity Act is the first comprehensive crypto market structure legislation in the US. It aims to divide oversight between the securities regulator SEC and the futures regulator CFTC. It would further define when a crypto asset counts as a security and when it counts as a digital commodity. The bill originally won a bipartisan majority of 294 to 134 votes in the House of Representatives in July 2025. On the same day, the House also passed the GENIUS Act on stablecoin regulation. President Donald Trump signed it one day later. Yet the Clarity Act soon stalled. The latest draft now contains more than 114 provisions requested by Democrats. In addition, it requires certain DeFi trading protocols to register with the CFTC.
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Registration requirement for DeFi trading protocols in the new draft
With the new text, Republicans are courting votes from the opposition. Senator Cynthia Lummis described the result of the incorporated requests as a strong, bipartisan product. In substance, however, the draft goes beyond concessions, because it also introduces new obligations for parts of the DeFi industry.
DeFi stands for decentralized finance applications, in which smart contracts on a blockchain settle transactions without a central intermediary. Under the draft, trading protocols that fall short of this standard would have to register with the CFTC. The bill text calls them "non-decentralized finance trading protocols." Furthermore, the agency and the US Treasury Department would issue the implementing rules. The degree of decentralization would thus determine whether a trading protocol falls under federal oversight.
Moreover, the new version narrows the scope of the DeFi provisions. They now apply only to spot trades and cash-settled transactions involving digital commodities. With cash settlement, only the difference in value changes hands as money, not the underlying asset. According to Lummis, the restriction aims to address concerns from tribal governments of Indigenous peoples about prediction markets. On such platforms, users bet on the outcome of real-world events.
Why the procedural vote on September 15 could fail
On September 15, the Senate will first vote on a procedural step. This so-called cloture vote decides whether the chamber takes up the bill for debate at all. It requires 60 of the 100 votes. The threshold prevents a simple majority from forcing debate on a bill against the will of the minority. Republicans hold the majority in the Senate with 53 seats, but they cannot reach 60 votes on their own.
No Democrat currently backs the latest version. In the Banking Committee, by contrast, the bill still drew votes from both parties in May 2026. There, Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland voted for the earlier version. It cleared the committee 15 to 9. That support, however, applied to the committee text, not to the new draft. Even if every Republican votes in favor, at least seven votes from the other party are still missing.
Then there is the political calendar. Lummis is not running again in the 2026 midterm elections, and her term ends in January 2027. She had already announced her retirement in December 2025. The senator driving the bill therefore has only a few months left in office. Additionally, the treatment of stablecoin yields is a central point of dispute between banks and the crypto industry. The Banking Committee draft bans interest and yield payments for merely holding stablecoins, but it allows activity-based rewards.
Ethics clause leaves enforcement to the Justice Department
The bill's ethics clause is politically sensitive. In July 2026, President Trump agreed to the underlying provision. It bars officials, employees and their spouses from issuing or sponsoring digital assets. The revised version leaves jurisdiction unchanged. The Department of Justice (DOJ) would enforce the clause, not state attorneys general. These state attorneys general act independently of Washington and could bring their own cases. The DOJ, on the other hand, is a federal department that reports to the President. Democrats had therefore demanded that state attorneys general also gain the power to prosecute violations.
The built-in expiration date stands out as well. The ethics clause expires in January 2029, the same month in which President Trump's current term ends. At the same time, Lummis argues that legislation, unlike a regulation, gives the industry a lasting solution. A law protects the industry from the back-and-forth of changing administrations, the senator said. That permanence does not apply to the ethics rules.
Clarity Act compared with the EU and Switzerland
Lummis points not least to the international competition over crypto rules to explain the urgency. One day before the text's release, she urged passage of the Clarity Act on X. The United States has a long tradition of leadership that it must not abandon, the senator wrote.
"The Clarity Act allows the United States to write these rules instead of watching from the sidelines while Singapore or the UAE write them for us." - Cynthia Lummis, US Senator (Wyoming)
In Europe, the EU's MiCA regulation (Markets in Crypto-Assets) already entered into force in June 2023. There, crypto firms gain access to all 27 member states with a single license, known as passporting. Switzerland took a different path. The country takes a principles-based approach to crypto activities. It relies on the token taxonomy of the financial market regulator FINMA and the Anti-Money Laundering Act. The DLT Act, in force since August 2021, also forms part of this framework. As a result, Swiss law has no single crypto license modeled on MiCA.
On stablecoins, the US is comparatively advanced, because the GENIUS Act already provides a comprehensive federal law. Still, it only takes effect on January 18, 2027, or 120 days after regulators issue the implementing rules. Whichever date comes first applies. Meanwhile, the rest of the market lacks a crypto-specific legal boundary between the SEC and the CFTC. That will not change until the Clarity Act takes effect. Consequently, if cloture fails on September 15, this gap will remain open for now.
