The CLARITY Act Markup: What’s Actually Happening Today
Your deep dive cheat sheet for the Senate Banking markup.
The one-line version
Today the Senate Banking Committee takes up the CLARITY Act for the first time. There is a vote, but it’s a committee vote, not the full Senate passing the law. Think of it as the first gate in a long race. Gavel is 15:30 BST / 10:30 ET in Dirksen Room 538, Washington DC.
The bill almost certainly clears committee. The interesting question is how it clears, and whether anything today tells us it can survive the much harder Senate floor fight later. That’s what we’re really watching for.
🔴 We’re covering this live
I’m live on YouTube through the whole markup, gavel to final vote. Pre-show starts before 15:30 BST, then we follow it through the amendment fights and the reporting vote in real time, with the market reaction as it happens.
Click through and hit “Notify me” on the video so you get reminded the moment we go live.
First, how a US bill actually works
If you don’t follow US politics closely, here’s the part that makes today make sense.
A bill in America has to clear a lot of stages. It starts in one of the two chambers, the House of Representatives or the Senate. Within each chamber, it first goes through a committee, a smaller group of lawmakers who specialise in that topic. The committee holds a markup, which is the meeting where they debate the bill, propose changes to it (called amendments), vote on those amendments, and then take a final vote on whether to send the bill forward to the rest of the chamber. That final step is called “reporting” the bill out.
So today is a markup. It is the Senate Banking Committee, 24 senators, deciding whether to pass the CLARITY Act up to the full Senate. It is genuinely important, it’s the first time the Senate has formally debated comprehensive crypto rules, but it is the start of the Senate process, not the end. After today the bill still needs the whole Senate, then the House again, then the President’s signature.
That’s why anyone calling today “the vote” has it slightly wrong. It’s a vote. It’s the committee vote.
How we got here: the timeline
This bill didn’t appear overnight. The trail matters because it shows how hard-won and how fragile the current text is.
May 2024. FIT21, the first serious attempt at crypto market structure rules, passes the House. It then dies in the Senate without a vote. CLARITY is its successor, the second attempt.
May 2025. H.R. 3633, the CLARITY Act, is introduced in the House.
July 2025. The House passes it 294-134, a strong bipartisan margin.
July 2025. Separately, the GENIUS Act (the narrower bill covering stablecoins) is signed into law. CLARITY defers to GENIUS on stablecoins, which is why the two are linked.
Sept 2025. The Senate formally receives the CLARITY Act.
January 2026. Senate Banking’s first attempt at this markup is scrapped on the morning it was due, after 137 amendments landed and Coinbase pulled its public support over the stablecoin rules.
29 Jan 2026. A related bill from the Senate Agriculture Committee advances out of that committee 12-11. (Two committees share crypto jurisdiction, more on that below.)
12 May 2026. Senators Scott, Lummis and Tillis release the current 309-page text just past midnight.
13 May 2026. The amendment deadline closes with 130+ amendments filed. Sen. Kennedy, the last Republican holdout, confirms he’ll vote yes.
Today, 14 May 2026. The markup.
What the CLARITY Act actually does
The simplest way to describe it: the bill tries to turn crypto from a patchwork of lawsuits and agency turf wars into a written rulebook. For years, US crypto regulation has happened through enforcement, regulators suing companies after the fact, rather than through clear law. CLARITY is the attempt to write the law down. Six pieces matter.
1. It splits the referees. This is the core of the bill. Two US agencies have spent years fighting over who polices crypto: the SEC, which regulates securities (think stocks), and the CFTC, which regulates commodities (think oil, wheat, gold). CLARITY draws the line. The CFTC gets spot trading of anything classed as a “digital commodity.” The SEC keeps fundraising and anything that behaves like an investment contract. A token can even “graduate” from SEC oversight to CFTC oversight once its network is mature and decentralised enough.
2. It creates a fundraising path. Eligible token projects could raise up to $50m a year for four years, capped at $200m, without the full heavyweight public-company securities process. This is the part that answers “how does a crypto project legally raise money in the US without living in permanent enforcement limbo.”
3. It adds investor protection and anti-crime controls. Limits on how fast insiders can sell, preserved fraud and insider-trading law, and crypto exchanges, brokers and dealers treated as proper financial institutions with full identity checks and suspicious-activity reporting.
4. It defines DeFi by control, not code. DeFi (”decentralised finance”) is crypto that runs on software with no company in the middle. The bill tries to separate genuinely decentralised protocols from things that just look decentralised but still have people in control. Crucially, it protects software developers from being treated as money transmitters simply for publishing code.
5. It handles the stablecoin question. The live wire of today’s session. Full explanation below.
6. It reality-checks the rest. Tokenised versions of stocks are still regulated as stocks. Holding your own crypto in your own wallet stays legal. Exchanges can’t trade against their own customers, the direct lesson from the FTX collapse, where customer money was secretly gambled. And it bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a government digital currency.
The stablecoin fight, explained
This is the fight that has jammed the bill for months, and it’s the one most people will actually understand, so it’s worth getting right.
A stablecoin is a crypto token pegged to a dollar, one coin, one dollar. People use them to hold and move money inside the crypto system. The question dividing Washington is simple: can crypto platforms pay you rewards for holding stablecoins?
The compromise in the current bill says no to passive yield, the kind that looks and feels exactly like interest on a bank savings account, but yes to activity-based rewards, things like cashback or loyalty perks for actually using the platform. The detailed rules would be written later by the Treasury and the CFTC.
That compromise was meant to be the breakthrough that finally moved the bill. It mostly is. But the banks aren’t satisfied, and that’s the pressure point for today.
What the banks are really doing
Here’s the part worth being honest about. The banking lobby, led by the American Bankers Association and two other big trade groups, formally rejected the stablecoin compromise five days before the markup. They’ve framed it as a financial-stability concern.
But strip the language back and the motive is competitive. Banks fund roughly 80% of their lending using customer deposits, the money sitting in your checking and savings accounts. It’s cheap money for them. Every dollar that moves out of a bank account and into a stablecoin wallet is a dollar of cheap funding the bank loses. Stablecoin rewards give people a reason to make that move. So the banks want the reward rules tightened as far as possible, ideally far enough to kill even cashback-style perks.
The crypto industry’s counter, made by Coinbase’s chief legal officer among others, is that the banks first objected to anything resembling a savings account, and now they’re going after ordinary customer rewards too. The argument: this was never really about stability, it’s about protecting bank deposits from competition.
You don’t have to pick a side to cover it. But understanding why each side is pushing is what lets you read today’s stablecoin vote properly.
That’s the full picture of what’s going on and why. The rest of this breakdown, the people and amendments that actually matter today, the bullish and bearish scenarios, the “sell the news” history, the key price levels, and what happens next, is for premium members.
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