The Senate has teed up a mid-September cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the crypto market structure bill that would draw a firm line between SEC and CFTC authority over digital assets, according to STnews reporting on Tuesday. The scheduling move puts the bill one procedural step away from a full floor debate, months after it cleared the Senate Banking Committee with new stablecoin yield provisions folded in.
The cloture vote is the gate that matters. If 60 senators agree to cut off debate, the bill moves to open amendment and a final floor vote. If it fails, the legislation stalls again, as it has in previous sessions, and regulators keep working from existing enforcement authority with no statutory map.
What the bill would do
The CLARITY Act, formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, assigns commodities-style oversight to the CFTC for most digital assets and leaves securities enforcement with the SEC for assets that meet the Howey test. It also defines registration paths for trading platforms that want to handle both kinds of assets, something no US venue can currently do under a single federal charter.
Lawmakers added stablecoin yield language during committee work, which reopened a fight over whether issuers should be allowed to pay interest on holdings. That question intersects with the GENIUS Act passed in June 2025, which requires payment stablecoins to be backed by cash, bank deposits and short-term Treasuries but stayed silent on yield.
| Bill | Status | Core scope |
|---|---|---|
| GENIUS Act | Signed June 2025 | Stablecoin reserve requirements |
| CLARITY Act | Cloture vote mid-September | SEC and CFTC market split |
| SEC Reg Crypto Assets | Proposed this week | Tailored offering exemptions |
The timing sits alongside a separate SEC proposal, reported Monday, for tailored offering exemptions under a framework the agency is calling Regulation Crypto Assets. Taken together, the two moves suggest regulators on both sides are positioning for a world where Congress sets the split and agencies fill in the detail.
Industry reaction
Exchange operators and lobbying groups have pushed for the market structure bill since the FTX collapse exposed the gap between the two agencies. Coinbase, Kraken and others have said a dual-regulator regime with clear definitions would let them list a wider range of tokens without case-by-case legal risk.
Critics, including some Senate Democrats and state securities regulators, argue the bill is too generous to trading platforms and would strip the SEC of tools it used in cases against Binance and Coinbase. Those objections shaped the committee markup and are likely to surface again as amendments.
The vote schedule also lands in a busy stretch for crypto policy. The SEC recently approved Nasdaq Texas Rule 5711(d) changes allowing ETF trusts to hold 15 percent in assets beyond their headline holdings, and the OECD is rolling out reporting rules across 76 jurisdictions. Institutional desks watching Washington say the market structure bill is the piece that decides how much of that activity lands onshore.
Whether the cloture vote happens exactly when leadership says is an open question. Senate calendars slip, and a single senator can hold the floor schedule hostage. But putting the bill on the calendar is a signal leadership counts enough votes, or believes it does. If the count holds, the US would get its first comprehensive digital asset market framework, three years after the first serious attempt died in the House.
A floor fight would also land in the middle of a midterm campaign, which cuts both ways. Republicans who backed the committee version want to campaign on crypto-friendly rules they delivered. Democrats in competitive races have to weigh donor pressure from the industry against base concern about consumer protection. Neither side has much appetite for a chaotic amendment free-for-all on camera, which is precisely what open floor debate becomes if the two camps are close in numbers.
One more variable is the SEC itself. The agency has shifted tone under current leadership, dropping several enforcement actions and signaling it will write rules rather than litigate. If the commission finalizes its offering exemption proposal before the Senate votes, some of the pressure behind the CLARITY Act eases. A few senators who supported the bill mostly as a rebuke to regulation by enforcement could decide the agency has fixed enough on its own.
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