The CLARITY Act tracker

Bill snapshot

Bill

H.R. 3633

House vote

294-134

Senate committee

15-9

Votes needed

60

Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025. Introduced 2025-05-29 by Rep. French Hill (R-AR), Chairman, House Financial Services Committee. House passage 2025-07-17, 216 Republicans and 78 Democrats voted yes, with four Republicans not voting. No Republican who voted opposed it. Senate Banking reported it 2026-05-14 and it now sits at Calendar No. 423. Any final text also has to be reconciled with S. 3755, Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act (Senate Agriculture Committee), which must be reconciled with the Banking text. 60 is the cloture threshold under Senate Rule XXII, not the passage threshold. Final passage is a simple majority of senators voting. In practice cloture is the gate. Not the first market structure bill to clear a chamber. FIT21 (H.R. 4763) passed the House 279-136 on 2024-05-22 in the 118th Congress with the same SEC and CFTC split. The CLARITY Act is the furthest one has advanced, since it has also cleared a Senate committee.

The analysis

• What the CLARITY Act actually doesThe CLARITY Act splits crypto oversight between the SEC and CFTC. What the bill does in plain language, with each provision labelled by version.
• Where the CLARITY Act stands right nowEvery dated milestone from introduction to the 616-page merged Senate text, with the real vote counts and what still has to happen before the bill becomes law.
• Why the CLARITY Act is stuckFive disputes are blocking the CLARITY Act, and the loudest one is about three specific gaps in the ethics section rather than about market structure.
• Who is backing the CLARITY Act, and what their numbers really meanBlackRock, Schwab, Fidelity and Goldman get named as backers. The $30 trillion figure adds three kinds of assets, and two never endorsed the bill.
• How the CLARITY Act divides the SEC and the CFTCThe bill gives the CFTC spot market authority over digital commodities and leaves securities with the SEC. The split is messier than the headline version suggests.
• The maturity test and the two 20 percent thresholdsThe CLARITY Act has two separate 20 percent thresholds and neither works the way the popular summary says. One is about voting power, the other about insider supply.
• Which tokens are exposed if the CLARITY Act passesWe scored 251 tokens against the variables the CLARITY Act cares about. Six clear the top band, and $138B of market cap sits in the most exposed one.
• The floor-time arithmetic behind CLARITY Act passagePassage hinges on floor days and one ethics fight, not on endorsements. Counting the Senate's remaining 2026 session time shows exactly how narrow the window is.

Who is backing it, and what their numbers measure

The four largest named backers report $39.56T between them. Only $22.44T of that is discretionary, meaning capital the firm itself allocates. The rest is custody and supervision, which is a different thing and rarely labelled as such in coverage. Only one of the four issued an explicit public statement urging passage.

251 tokens scored against the bill

Early Thunder scores every token on its scorecard for regulatory safety, holder concentration, and institutional adoption. Those three variables approximate what the bill measures, so we combined them into a readiness score out of 100. The median across 251 tokens is 45, which is a weaker distribution than the market narrative implies. Treat it as our own heuristic, not a legal opinion.

What is blocking it

The floor-time problem

The Senate is in session the first week of August, then leaves. It returns 2026-09-14. Senators are scheduled out of Washington for nearly all of October and the first week of November. Election Day is 2026-11-03. Roughly 22 scheduled session days remain after Election Day, across November 9 to 10, November 16 to 20, and November 30 to December 18. The 119th Congress does not end until 2027-01-03, so a lame-duck vote stays possible on the calendar. September is the last extended pre-election window, not the last chance. The lame duck is real floor time. It is also when a bill with no funding cliff behind it competes with everything that does, and when members who just lost re-election are voting.

Timeline

1. 2024-05-22

   FIT21 passes the House first

   The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act clears the House 279-136 in the 118th Congress, using the same SEC and CFTC split. It dies in the Senate. Coverage that calls the CLARITY Act the first market structure bill to pass a chamber is wrong, and the FIT21 precedent is the more useful base rate.

   Source
2. 2025-05-29

   Bill introduced in the House

   House Financial Services Chairman French Hill introduces H.R. 3633, splitting digital asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC.

   Source
3. 2025-06-10

   Dual committee markup

   Both committees report the bill the same day. Agriculture 47-6, Financial Services 32-19. The joint path reflects the two-regulator design and it is why two Senate committees now have a claim on the text.

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4. 2025-07-17

   House passes 294-134

   216 Republicans and 78 Democrats vote yes. Four Republicans do not vote, and no Republican who voted opposed it. That is the high-water mark for bipartisan support on this bill.

   Source
5. 2025-07-22

   Senate discussion draft

   Senator Tim Scott and Senator Cynthia Lummis release the Senate Banking version for comment. The Senate rewrite begins here, and it is the reason the bill still is not law a year later.

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6. 2025-09-05

   182-page Responsible Financial Innovation Act draft

   Senate Banking publishes a second, longer draft under a different name. Two competing frameworks now exist in the Senate, and definitions start diverging between them.

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7. 2026-01-12

   278-page draft with stablecoin yield limits

   The banking lobby wins language restricting yield-bearing stablecoins, arguing that paying holders would pull deposits out of community banks.

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8. 2026-01-14

   Coinbase pulls its support

   Brian Armstrong says Coinbase cannot support the bill as written, the night before a scheduled Senate Banking markup. The markup slips. Stablecoin yield was one objection among several and it was not the one he led with.

   Source
9. 2026-01-29

   Senate Agriculture advances its own bill 12-11

   Chairman John Boozman's Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act, S. 3755, clears Agriculture on a party-line vote and lands at Calendar No. 312 on February 2. Committee Democrats objected to the absence of restrictions on federal officials issuing or endorsing digital assets, the same objection now holding up the Banking text.

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10. 2026-05-12

    309-page compromise text

    Senate Banking publishes compromise language two days before the markup.

    Source
11. 2026-05-14

    Senate Banking advances 15-9

    Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) join all 13 Republicans. Both said a committee vote did not commit them on the floor while ethics, illicit finance, and consumer protection remain open.

    Source
12. 2026-06-01

    Reported to the Senate as Calendar No. 423

    Senator Scott reports the bill with an amendment in the nature of a substitute. This substitute is a different document from the House-passed text, and definitions moved. Being on the calendar makes the bill eligible for floor consideration, it does not schedule anything, and no cloture motion has been filed.

    Source
13. 2026-07-21

    Ethics agreement announced

    Sponsors and the White House announce negotiated ethics language after talks the previous day. Section 13152 bars covered officials, employees and their spouses from issuing or sponsoring a digital asset for consideration. It does not restrict promotion or endorsement, it does not reach dependent children, and it sunsets at noon on 2029-01-20. Extending it to children and to promotion was exactly what Democrats were asking for.

    Source
14. 2026-07-22

    616-page merged text released

    Senator Lummis releases the merged text incorporating the ethics deal. It also folds in the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, a safe harbour confirming non-custodial developers are not money transmitters, plus 25 new sections on law enforcement.

    Source
15. 2026-07-22

    Seven Democrats say the bill falls short

    Alsobrooks, Booker, Cortez Masto, Gallego, Hickenlooper, Warner and Warnock say the text falls short on ethics for elected officials, consumer protection, illicit finance, conflicts of interest and market integrity. Gallego and Alsobrooks are the two who voted it out of committee in May.

    Source
16. 2026-07-23

    Thune signals the window is closing

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he would like to at least get Clarity started, and that they will see where the votes are. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt says he is perplexed by that and would not count out the first week of August. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says he is very supportive of moving the bill forward while conceding it is not perfect.

    Source

The definitions that decide everything

Mature blockchain system

House-passed text, July 2025

The core definition is short. A mature blockchain system is a blockchain system, together with its related digital commodity, that is not controlled by any person or group of persons under common control. The operational test lives separately in the certification criteria added as Exchange Act Section 42, which cover whether the system is functional, open source, running on pre-established transparent rules, free of anyone holding unilateral authority to materially alter it, and distributed in ownership. Maturity is the concept the whole framework turns on. It is also the part that moved most between the House text and the Senate substitute, so any analysis that does not say which document it is reading is not telling you much.

The two 20 percent thresholds

House-passed text, Exchange Act Section 42 certification criteria

There are two of them and neither is a general rule about large holders. One says no person may control 20 percent or more of the outstanding voting power. The other says the issuer, related persons and affiliated persons must not beneficially own 20 percent or more of total units in aggregate. Affiliated-person status keys off acquiring 5 percent or more from the issuer, and related-person status off 1 percent. The popular summary that holding 20 percent of a token defeats maturity is wrong. An unaffiliated whale sitting on 25 percent does not break the test. What breaks it is insider supply, counted across the issuer and everyone connected to it. That makes team, foundation and investor allocations the thing to measure, not the rich list.

Ancillary asset

Definitions moved between drafts. Read the version you are relying on.

In the House framing an ancillary asset is an intangible, commercially fungible asset distributed alongside the sale of a security through an investment contract. The token is the ancillary asset and the contract around it is the security. Senate drafts have reworked this repeatedly, and the definition circulating in most explainers comes from a 2025 discussion draft rather than the current vehicle. The separation is what lets a token trade as a commodity even though the fundraising that created it was a securities offering. It is also the single most rewritten definition in the bill, so quoting it without a version label is how explainers end up describing law that does not exist.

Non-custodial developer safe harbour

Merged Senate text, 2026-07-22

The merged text folds in the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, confirming that developers who never take custody of user funds are not money transmitters. Least opposition of anything in the bill, and the most practical effect on people who write code. It got almost no coverage next to the ethics fight.

Section 13152 ethics restriction

Merged Senate text, 2026-07-22

Covered officials, employees and their spouses may not issue or sponsor a digital asset in exchange for consideration. Promotion and endorsement are not covered, dependent children are not covered, and the section has no force after noon on 2029-01-20. The three gaps are the whole dispute. Democrats want promotion covered, children covered, and the sunset removed, and the bill does not move until that lands.