Congress push for CLARITY Act

Washington is trying to finish a crypto rulebook that has been missing for years, and the strange part is that the two agencies that usually fight over crypto are now asking Congress to draw the map for them. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on April 8 that Congress should pass the CLARITY Act, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins joined the push this week. (usnews.com, bitcoinmagazine.com) The fight is over who polices what. The Securities and Exchange Commission has argued that many tokens look like securities, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has long been seen by the industry as the lighter-touch cop for commodities like bitcoin. (congress.gov, congress.gov) The CLARITY Act is Congress’s attempt to split that territory with actual lines instead of lawsuits. A Congressional Research Service summary says the bill would give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the central role over “digital commodities” and keep parts of Securities and Exchange Commission authority over primary-market token sales. (congress.gov) The bill also tries to answer a harder question: when does a token stop looking like a startup fundraising contract and start looking like a product people simply use on a network. The House version says a blockchain has to be “mature” and not controlled by one person or group, with large holders capped below 20% of outstanding units for certain parts of the framework to apply. (congress.gov) That matters for exchanges because the referee determines the rulebook. If a token is treated more like a commodity than a security, the trading venue, broker, and custodian rules can shift with it, which is why market-structure legislation has become the industry’s main Washington priority after stablecoin legislation. (congress.gov, cointelegraph.com) This is not a brand-new bill starting from zero. The House of Representatives passed the CLARITY Act on July 17, 2025, and the Senate has spent months trying to write its own version and resolve objections before a committee markup. (clerk.house.gov, congress.gov) The Senate timeline suddenly looks real again. Senator Bill Hagerty said on April 6 at Vanderbilt University that the Senate Banking Committee could start moving market-structure legislation as soon as next week, which is the clearest public signal yet that April could be the decision month. (cointelegraph.com, cryptotimes.io) The snag has been stablecoin yield, which sounds technical but is really about whether exchanges can pay users a return for holding dollar-linked tokens on their platforms. CoinDesk reported on April 2 that negotiators were still circulating compromise language, and Cryptonews reported on March 27 that Coinbase had told Senate offices it could not support the latest draft. (coindesk.com, cryptonews.com) Coinbase’s objection was not abstract. Cryptonews said the revised draft would prohibit exchanges from paying rewards on stablecoin balances, and it tied that fight to Coinbase’s 2025 stablecoin revenue, which the report said reached $1.35 billion through its United States Dollar Coin relationship with Circle. (cryptonews.com) Then the politics shifted again in less than two weeks. After resisting earlier drafts, Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong publicly backed passage on April 9, posting that it was “time to pass the Clarity Act” in response to Bessent’s call for action. (cryptotimes.io, crypto2community.com) So the story in Washington is no longer whether anyone wants a crypto market bill. The story is whether Congress can pass one fast enough, with terms strict enough for regulators and loose enough for exchanges, before another round of delay turns “clarity” back into another year of case-by-case fights. (usnews.com, congress.gov)