Clarity Act clears Senate Banking panel

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 on May 14 in a 15-9 bipartisan vote, sending one of Congress’s main crypto market-structure bills to the Senate floor. Chairman Tim Scott said the measure followed “nearly a year of good-faith bipartisan negotiations,” and the committee’s release described it as legislation to establish “clear rules of the road” for digital assets. (banking.senate.gov) (congress.gov) H.R. 3633 already passed the House on July 17, 2025, by a 294-134 vote, according to Congress.gov. That means the Senate is now working from a bill that has already cleared one chamber, even as Banking Committee Republicans released updated Senate text ahead of the markup on May 12. (banking.senate.gov) ### What did the committee actually approve? H.R. 3633 is the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, introduced in the House by Representative French Hill and referred in the Senate on September 18, 2025, according to Congress.gov. The Senate Banking Committee said its markup advanced that House bill with updated text reflecting negotiations with Democratic senators and outside stakeholders. (banking.senate.gov) The May 12 section-by-section summary says the Banking Committee bill would set disclosure rules for certain “ancillary assets,” create a new exemption from Securities Act registration called “Regulation Crypto,” and treat qualifying tokens as commodities in that framework. The summary also says the bill would let companies raise the greater of $50 million per calendar year for four years or 10% of the total dollar value of outstanding ancillary assets, subject to a $200 million gross-proceeds cap. (congress.gov) ### Does the bill put the CFTC in charge? The Congressional Research Service said H.R. 3633 would give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission “a central role in regulating digital commodities and related intermediaries” while preserving some Securities and Exchange Commission authority over primary-market crypto transactions. (congress.gov) CRS also said the bill would define a digital commodity as a digital asset whose value is “intrinsically linked” to the use of the blockchain. The same CRS summary says stablecoins are excluded from the bill’s definition of digital commodity. That means the legislation does not simply place every major crypto asset into one bucket; it separates stablecoins from the digital-commodity framework described in the bill. (banking.senate.gov) ### Does the bill name Bitcoin, Ether, Solana or XRP? The Banking Committee materials reviewed here do not list Bitcoin, Ether, Solana or XRP by name in the committee press release or the section-by-section summary. A later law-firm analysis described federal guidance classifying Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP as digital commodities, but that is separate from the committee’s own summary of H.R. 3633. (congress.gov) The same caution applies to claims that the committee vote specifically added protections for open-source developers and coders. The committee’s public press release and the section-by-section document available on the Senate site describe the bill’s structure and investor protections, but the materials surfaced in this reporting did not independently confirm that specific provision. (congress.gov) ### Why has this bill drawn so much attention? Tim Scott said the bill is meant to bring digital assets “into the sunlight with clear rules, stronger safeguards, and better tools to stop bad actors.” Cynthia Lummis said the updated text represented nearly a year of bipartisan work, while Thom Tillis called it a “bipartisan compromise” aimed at providing regulatory certainty. (banking.senate.gov) The Senate Banking Committee’s May 12 fact sheet said the bill is designed to establish “clear, enforceable guardrails” for digital asset markets, protect consumers and investors, and counter illicit finance and national security threats. (banking.senate.gov) ### What happens next on the Senate side? The committee’s May 14 release says the bill now moves to the Senate floor. Congress.gov still lists H.R. 3633 as a House-passed bill referred to the Senate Banking Committee, so the next public milestone will be Senate floor action on that legislation or a Senate substitute tied to it. (banking.senate.gov) If the Senate passes a version different from the House-passed text, lawmakers would need to reconcile the two versions before the measure could go to the president. Congress.gov identifies the bill as part of the 119th Congress and shows no final Senate passage yet. (congress.gov) (banking.senate.gov 1) (banking.senate.gov 2)