Senate Republicans released a revised draft of the CLARITY Act on Sunday night, calling it their last offer to Democrats before a Tuesday cloture vote that needs 60 votes to advance. The rewrite adds a stablecoin deposit-flight circuit breaker, new ethics commitments from President Trump and tighter limits on conflicts of interest, but opposition on three fronts is still standing.
The revised text landed hours before the Senate was set to test whether the bill can clear the chamber’s procedural threshold. Prediction markets put the odds of passage somewhere between 21.5 and 30 percent, a wide gap that reflects how little consensus the last-minute changes bought. The bill would move most digital asset market oversight from the SEC to the CFTC, the central structural ask of the US crypto industry since 2023, and would settle in statute which tokens count as commodities and which remain securities.
The timing was deliberate. Sunday-night releases before a Tuesday vote give opponents almost no window to organize amendments, and the majority clearly hoped a bundle of concessions would lock in enough moderates to reach 60. Whether that arithmetic works becomes clear within hours of this writing.
What changed in the new draft
The most consequential addition is a circuit breaker in the stablecoin yield section. Instead of an outright ban on stablecoin rewards, the draft lets federal regulators intervene if community bank deposits flow heavily into stablecoins, with the determination made by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent backed the change publicly, saying the latest draft gives his office additional authority to protect community banks from stablecoin-related risks.
The concern behind the provision is straightforward. Stablecoins issued by nonbank firms pay yields that insured banks cannot match, and community banks in particular depend on local deposit bases that could drain quickly if customers chase those returns. A heavy shift of deposits into tokenized dollars would shrink the lending capacity of thousands of small banks, which is why the banking lobby has pushed hard on this section through multiple drafts.
The ethics section incorporates about 80 percent of the Tillis-Gallego proposal, which Trump has endorsed. It requires the president to sell significant crypto-related financial interests or place them in a blind trust. That provision answers months of criticism about the president’s family crypto ventures, which Democrats had used as a talking point against every version of the bill. The draft also allows state attorneys general to enforce ethics and digital-asset prohibitions, a concession aimed at the state officials who have been loudest in opposition. Restrictions on vertical integration tighten too, covering related-party transactions and conflicts of interest involving digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers.
The criminal-liability shield for software developers, one of the two most contested pieces of the bill, was also reworked. The BRCA protections were narrowed. Neither change has satisfied the advocates on either side of those debates.
Three fronts of opposition
The opposition splits into camps that rarely agree. Eighteen state attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James in a bipartisan coalition, signed a letter urging the Senate to reject the bill unless it preserves state fraud enforcement powers. They argue the current text could shield scammers by preempting the state-level enforcement that has produced most of the industry’s actual penalties. State regulators have historically moved faster than federal ones on crypto fraud cases, and they do not want that advantage written out of law.
Banking groups object to parts of the market structure, particularly provisions they read as opening the door to fintech charters that bypass traditional bank regulation. Developer advocates say the reworked liability language still leaves coders exposed when their software is later used in fraud schemes. On the industry side, the reaction to the Sunday-night text was blunt. Journalist Eleanor Terrett reported that “disappointing” was the common refrain among industry figures she spoke to about the BRCA changes, most of whom would not go on the record.
Not everyone is unhappy. Attorney Gabriel Shapiro called the circuit breaker a smart compromise, noting that a regulator-triggered intervention beats a statutory ban on stablecoin rewards. Bessent tied the bill to the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law passed in 2025, and called CLARITY essential to the United States winning what he framed as a global technology race. The GENIUS Act’s enforcement date arrives January 18, 2027, and market structure rules are meant to sit alongside it. Industry lawyers note that if CLARITY slips past this session, firms will operate for another year under the current SEC-CFTC turf confusion that the bill was written to end.
The market is watching the vote, not the law
Bitcoin traded near $78,000 on Monday and XRP around $1.41, both higher on the day as traders priced in some probability of passage. XRP has been the most sensitive major token to the bill’s fortunes because the legislation would clarify the status of tokens like its own and affect Ripple’s stablecoin business, RLUSD, which sits near $2.4 billion in supply. Coinbase shares have also tracked the bill’s odds all summer.
The distinction that matters for Tuesday is procedural. A successful cloture vote does not make the CLARITY Act law. It ends debate and opens the amendment and final-vote process, where the three opposition fronts would get another round. If cloture fails, the bill likely dies for this session, and the industry’s years-long push for market structure legislation restarts from scratch in the next Congress.
The House passed its own version of the market structure bill in July. The Senate draft has been the sticking point, with Democrats arguing the CFTC lacks the funding and staff to police a market the bill hands it. Tuesday’s vote is the first hard test of whether the coalition that drafted it can hold 60 senators together. Either way, the answer arrives soon.