A digital-asset market-structure bill has cleared the US Senate Banking Committee, which voted 15-9 on 14 May 2026 to advance the measure after months of negotiation. Rather than write a wholly separate Senate bill, the committee took up the House's H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and reported it out with a substitute amendment, so the CLARITY Act is now the vehicle carrying the Senate's effort forward. We set out the procedural path and timelines in our CLARITY Act briefing.
The legislation would draw the long-contested boundary between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over digital assets. The CFTC would become the primary regulator for assets treated as digital commodities, taking on much of the spot crypto market, while the SEC would keep authority over tokens that behave as securities, the terrain it is separately trying to shape through its proposed Regulation Crypto Assets regime. Which side an asset falls depends on its characteristics and on whether it runs on what the bill calls a mature blockchain system, broadly a network that is functional, open-source and not controlled by any single party, a test meant to gauge how decentralised the underlying network has become.
The bill still has a road ahead. The Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC, advanced its own companion, the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act, on a narrow party-line vote in January 2026, and that work has since been folded into a single floor vehicle. The measure is now queued for its first procedural vote on the Senate floor on 15 September 2026; even if it clears, a Senate-passed version would still have to be conformed with the House-passed H.R. 3633 before it could become law.
The House moved first, passing H.R. 3633 by 294 votes to 134 on 17 July 2025, with unanimous Republican support and dozens of Democrats joining.
One provision in the Banking Committee's text has drawn particular fire. It would let digital-asset firms pay "stablecoin rewards" linked to a customer's transaction or payment activity, stopping short of paying interest for merely holding a coin. Banking groups have opposed it, with the American Bankers Association and others warning that yield-like rewards could pull deposits out of the banking system, a fault line that runs through the wider fight over diverging stablecoin rules.
