Crypto policy nudges accelerate

Washington and Tokyo both moved this month to put clearer rules around crypto, with Senator Cynthia Lummis pressing for a United States market-structure bill as Japan approved a bill to treat crypto as a financial product. (theblock.co, coindesk.com) In the United States, the House passed the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 by a 294-134 vote on July 17, 2025, and the bill was received in the Senate on September 18, 2025. The bill would split oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and set rules for digital-asset offerings and trading venues. (congress.gov) Lummis told the DC Blockchain Summit on March 18, 2026, that the Senate Banking Committee planned to mark up a market-structure bill after the Easter recess and said negotiations had been hung up on stablecoin yield. Senator Bernie Moreno said at the same event that if Congress did not pass the Clarity Act by May, digital-asset legislation would not pass “for the foreseeable future.” (theblock.co) The basic fight is about who regulates what. Congress has spent the past year trying to draw a line between tokens that work more like securities, which usually fall under the Securities and Exchange Commission, and tokens that work more like commodities, which usually fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (congress.gov, banking.senate.gov) Senate Republicans framed their July 22, 2025 discussion draft as the next step after the House vote. In that release, Lummis said “the time for regulatory uncertainty in the digital asset space has come to an end,” while Chairman Tim Scott said the goal was “clear rules of the road” that protect investors and keep digital-finance activity in the United States. (banking.senate.gov, lummis.senate.gov) Japan’s move came on April 10, 2026, when the government approved a bill to bring crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, the main framework used for stocks and other investment products. Reporting by Nikkei, cited by CoinDesk, said the change would shift crypto away from a payments-style framework and toward investment-style regulation. (coindesk.com, fsa.go.jp) That change would add securities-style guardrails, including insider-trading restrictions, according to multiple reports on the cabinet-approved bill. Japan’s Financial Services Agency is the national regulator overseeing the framework. (cointelegraph.com, fsa.go.jp) Japan’s crypto rules have tightened before, often after exchange failures and investor-loss episodes, while the United States has spent years relying on court fights and agency enforcement to sort out crypto categories. The current push in both countries points in the same direction: fewer ad hoc calls and more written rules. (fsa.go.jp, banking.senate.gov) The next test is procedural, not rhetorical. In Washington, the Senate still has to move a bill that has been sitting since September 2025, and in Tokyo, the cabinet-approved measure still has to clear the National Diet. (congress.gov, coindesk.com)