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Key Takeaways
- The new Clarity Act draft adds CFTC registration and Bank Secrecy Act requirements for DeFi entities and clarifies rules for credit unions.
- Democrats say the draft still lacks a bipartisan ethics provision restraining Trump and senior officials from profiting off crypto businesses.
- Banking trade groups sent lawmakers a letter this week seeking tighter restrictions on stablecoin yield and rewards, adding a separate obstacle ahead of the vote.
Senate Republicans circulated a new draft of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Thursday, adjusting provisions covering decentralized finance and credit unions ahead of a scheduled Tuesday procedural vote.
The bill needs 60 votes to advance when the Senate returns from its August recess, and Democrats have not signaled the new text resolves their core objection: the absence of a bipartisan ethics provision covering senior government officials, including President Donald Trump.
What The New Draft Changes
The new text adds specific requirements for decentralized finance entities, including when DeFi projects would need to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and comply with Bank Secrecy Act requirements.
Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis, one of the bill’s chief negotiators, said the revised language also clarifies that the DeFi provisions are meant to apply only to spot-market and cash transactions in digital commodities, not to prediction markets, and gives credit unions clearer guidance on how they can engage with digital assets.
Beyond those changes, the bulk of the bill’s text closely resembles earlier versions that have circulated since Senate negotiations began. The legislation is intended to establish a federal framework for how regulators, primarily the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, oversee cryptocurrency market activity.
Lummis Defends The Push For Legislation
Lummis, who continued working on the bill during the August recess, argued the Senate should move forward with legislation rather than leave crypto regulation to current federal regulators. She said in a statement:
“We have incorporated more than 114 separate provisions at my Democrat colleagues’ request, and as a result, this bill is a strong bipartisan product. Unlike rulemaking, legislation gives this industry a lasting solution that shields it from the whiplash of changes in the White House.”
Lummis added that since the CFTC and SEC will write rules on digital assets with or without the Clarity Act, she believes a lasting, bipartisan compromise is the best route for America’s future.
Her framing treats the bill as a way to lock in durable rules rather than rely on regulatory guidance that could shift with each administration. This argument is aimed at both Democratic holdouts and Republicans wary of specific provisions in the current draft.
Ethics Dispute Remains The Central Obstacle
Key Democrats have said they will not support the bill without a bipartisan ethics provision restraining Trump and other senior officials from profiting off crypto businesses, and Trump’s sign-off on such a provision has not materialized.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said earlier this week that the White House still needed to engage on a bipartisan ethics proposal before the bill could move forward, a comment reported by news outlet Semafor.
Some Republicans have separately expressed reservations about other elements of the legislation, meaning the bill’s path to 60 votes is not simply a matter of winning over Democrats.
The combination of an unresolved ethics dispute and scattered Republican concerns leaves the outcome of Tuesday’s cloture vote uncertain even after the new draft’s release.
Administration Pressure And Banking Industry Pushback
White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt urged senators in both parties to vote to advance the bill on Tuesday and allow the legislative process to continue. He wrote in a post on X that doing so would keep the process alive regardless of the bill’s final form.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made a similar appeal in his own post, warning that failing to clear the procedural hurdle would send a troubling signal to allies and adversaries about America’s willingness to lead on digital assets.
Separately, the banking industry raised its own objections this week. The American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, and 77 state banking associations sent an open letter to lawmakers on Thursday.
The letter called for greater restrictions on the yield and rewards stablecoin companies can offer, a concern that had already surfaced among some lawmakers before the summer recess.
Where The Bill Stands Ahead Of Tuesday’s Vote
Digital Chamber head Cody Carbone, whose organization has worked on the legislation for years, described the new draft as the product of years of bipartisan negotiation. He said the Senate needed to act to avoid ceding leadership in digital asset regulation to other countries.
Whether the bill clears Tuesday’s cloture vote remains genuinely uncertain. The vote requires support from both parties, and neither the ethics-provision dispute nor the banking industry’s stablecoin concerns had been resolved as of Thursday’s draft release.
