The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — the single most consequential piece of U.S. crypto legislation since the GENIUS Act — has no Senate Banking Committee markup date as of April 21, 2026. The bill passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 with bipartisan support. Nine months later, it remains stuc...
"If we don't get the Clarity Act passed by May, digital asset legislation will not pass for the foreseeable future." — Senator Bernie Moreno, Senate Banking Committee
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — the single most consequential piece of U.S. crypto legislation since the GENIUS Act — has no Senate Banking Committee markup date as of April 21, 2026. The bill passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 with bipartisan support. Nine months later, it remains stuck in Senator Tim Scott's committee over three unresolved issues: stablecoin yield restrictions, DeFi safe harbor provisions, and Republican vote alignment.
The timeline arithmetic is unforgiving. A late-April markup leaves roughly four procedural steps — committee vote, 60-vote Senate floor passage, reconciliation with the House version, and presidential signature — compressed into a window that closes before the November 2026 midterms. Senate floor procedure alone requires two to three weeks. If the Banking Committee does not clear the bill by mid-May, the CLARITY Act effectively dies for this Congress. Polymarket prices the probability of 2026 signing at 51%, down from 90% in late February. The crypto industry has spent $193 million through Fairshake PAC to build the political conditions for passage. That investment now faces a binary outcome measured in days.
Chairman Tim Scott told Fox Business on April 14 that the Senate Banking Committee markup may not happen in April. He identified three remaining obstacles:
Stablecoin yield language — the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise text bans passive yield on stablecoin balances while permitting activity-based rewards. Banks continue to oppose even this narrow allowance. Scott estimates two weeks to resolve.
DeFi provisions — Safe harbor language for decentralized protocol developers and validators remains contested. Several Senate Democrats cite illicit finance concerns. Scott estimates two weeks to resolve.
Republican committee unity — The chairman needs all Republican members aligned before scheduling a vote that may lack Democratic support. No timeline given.
Each of those two-week estimates started on April 14. If accurate, the earliest possible markup falls in late April or early May. Senator Cynthia Lummis issued a public warning on April 11: vote now, or wait until 2030. The bill was dropped from the Senate daily schedule as of April 15, according to Coinpedia.
The procedural path after committee passage requires a 60-vote cloture motion on the Senate floor — meaning at least eight Democrats must vote with all 52 Republicans, assuming no defections. This threshold has not been tested. The bill then enters a conference committee to reconcile the Senate version with the House-passed H.R. 3633, before returning to both chambers for final votes.
The bill establishes a federal regulatory framework for digital assets by dividing them into three categories:
Digital commodities — assets intrinsically linked to a blockchain whose value derives from that blockchain's use. Oversight shifts to the CFTC, which gains exclusive jurisdiction over spot markets and anti-fraud enforcement. Bitcoin and most functional tokens fall here.
Investment contract assets — tokens sold as part of investment contracts. The SEC retains registration, reporting, and anti-fraud authority. This category covers token launches and securities-like instruments.
Permitted payment stablecoins — governed separately under the GENIUS Act (signed 2025), which established reserve requirements and issuer licensing. The CLARITY Act adds yield-related restrictions and aligns stablecoin rules with the broader market structure framework.
The jurisdictional split addresses a longstanding structural problem. Since 2017, the SEC and CFTC have overlapped, conflicted, and individually regulated by enforcement rather than statute. According to the Senate Banking Committee's fact sheet, the CLARITY Act would "end the era of regulation by enforcement" by creating statutory definitions rather than relying on case-by-case agency action.
For exchanges, the practical impact is registration. Platforms handling digital commodities — including major crypto exchanges — would register with the CFTC under a new intermediary framework. SEC-registered brokers and dealers retain their existing authority over investment contract assets.
On March 17, 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly issued interim guidance that mirrors much of the CLARITY Act's classification framework, dividing digital assets into five categories (digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins, and digital securities). This guidance, while not law, signals that both agencies are already operationalizing the bill's logic — and may prefer to continue doing so without statutory constraints.
The central dispute delaying the bill is whether stablecoin issuers or third-party platforms can pass yield to holders. The economics are straightforward: stablecoin issuers hold approximately $317 billion in reserves, primarily in short-term U.S. Treasuries yielding 4-5%. That generates roughly $13-16 billion in annual revenue. The question is who captures it.
The GENIUS Act (2025) prohibited issuers from paying interest directly to attract customers. The crypto industry argued this left a structural workaround: third-party platforms like Coinbase could offer rewards on stablecoin balances using revenue-sharing arrangements with issuers.
The Senate compromise text, authored by Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks, closes that workaround. The language:
The American Bankers Association continues to oppose even the activity-based exception, arguing it creates competitive asymmetry with bank deposits. A White House Council of Economic Advisers report countered that banning all stablecoin yield would increase U.S. bank lending by only $2.1 billion — a 0.02% increase — while the banking lobby's claimed deposit-flight risk was "significantly overstated."
White House Digital Assets Adviser Patrick Witt confirmed on April 14 that the yield compromise has been reached in principle. Whether that holds through markup remains uncertain.
The CLARITY Act directs the SEC to use its existing exemptive authority to shield certain decentralized finance activities from broker-dealer registration. Specifically, the bill provides safe harbors for:
Senate Democrats, led by members of the Banking Committee, have pushed back on the breadth of these exemptions, citing concerns about anti-money laundering enforcement and the difficulty of pursuing illicit finance through protocols that have no registered operator.
The existing report on SEC DeFi front-end exemptions (published April 20) covered the agency's administrative action. The CLARITY Act's provisions are statutory and would be more durable — but also harder to pass.
The bill's trajectory changed on April 9 when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted on X that the company now supports the CLARITY Act's passage. This reversed a position Armstrong had held since January 14, 2026, when — hours before a scheduled Senate Banking Committee markup — he posted that Coinbase "unfortunately couldn't support the bill as written" and would "rather have no bill than a bad bill."
Armstrong's January intervention effectively killed the markup. His opposition centered on the stablecoin yield restrictions, which threatened Coinbase's USDC rewards program — a meaningful revenue line for the company.
The April reversal came in response to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's public call for swift Senate action. Armstrong endorsed Bessent's position, signaling that Coinbase had accepted the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise language.
Coinbase had previously blocked the bill twice in 2026, according to CryptoTimes. The company's Chief Policy Officer, Faryar Shirzad, stated on April 17 that he expects Chairman Scott to schedule a markup "as early as this month" with a floor vote target in May.
The reversal removed the crypto industry's last major internal holdout. Whether it was sufficient to move Senator Scott's timeline remains unclear.
The CLARITY Act exists in its current form because of sustained political spending. The crypto industry's primary electoral vehicle, Fairshake PAC, held a combined war chest of $193 million as of January 28, 2026. The three largest contributors: Coinbase ($25 million), Ripple ($25 million), and Andreessen Horowitz ($24 million).
Fairshake operates through two affiliate PACs — Defend American Jobs (Republican-aligned) and Protect Progress (Democratic-aligned). The most direct connection between Fairshake's spending and the CLARITY Act's current Senate composition: in the 2024 cycle, Defend American Jobs spent $40.1 million supporting Bernie Moreno's Senate campaign against then-Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Brown lost. Moreno now sits on the committee that will vote on the CLARITY Act.
Total industry spending through Fairshake exceeded $149 million through FEC filings as documented by FinTech Weekly. This figure does not include direct lobbying expenditures, which are reported separately.
The economic logic is simple. The crypto industry spent approximately $149 million to elect a favorable Congress. The CLARITY Act is the return on that investment. If it fails, the industry will have spent nine figures on a regulatory framework that produced only the narrower GENIUS Act.
Senator Lummis's warning — pass it now or wait until 2030 — reflects the legislative calendar. The 119th Congress ends in January 2027. The November 2026 midterms will likely reshape committee compositions. A new Congress would need to re-introduce, re-mark-up, and re-pass a market structure bill from scratch.
In the interim, the SEC-CFTC joint guidance from March 2026 would continue to serve as the operational framework. This guidance has no statutory force and can be revised or revoked by future agency leadership. The crypto industry would operate under a patchwork of:
For market participants, the practical impact of failure is continued regulatory ambiguity on the core question the CLARITY Act was designed to answer: which assets are commodities and which are securities. That ambiguity has cost the industry an estimated $4.2 billion in legal and compliance spending since 2023, according to the Blockchain Association.
The CLARITY Act's path to law has narrowed to a procedural corridor measured in weeks. The bill's substance — a statutory framework replacing regulation by enforcement — is less disputed than its attached stablecoin yield provisions. The yield fight is, at its core, a $13-16 billion annual revenue allocation dispute between banks and crypto platforms, dressed in regulatory language.
The industry got the Congress it paid for. Whether it gets the legislation depends on whether Chairman Scott can resolve three outstanding issues before the calendar runs out. Every day without a markup date reduces the probability of passage. The market, as reflected in prediction contract pricing, has already priced in meaningful doubt.