Senate Banking Committee Advances Clarity Act 15-9, Sending Crypto Bill Toward the Floor
After a markup that was postponed in January, fought over for months and nearly derailed again on the day itself, the Senate Banking Committee voted 15 to 9 on Thursday to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. With both relevant Senate committees now on record, the bill has cleared its last committee hurdle before the full Senate.
All 13 Republicans on the committee voted yes. They were joined by two Democrats, Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, both of whom had spent months negotiating the text. The remaining nine Democrats voted no.
How the vote came together
The outcome was not settled when the session opened. According to CoinDesk, early amendment votes split mostly along party lines before Chairman Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, revived a set of amendments he had previously turned down in order to secure Democratic support. Those changes added investor protections, clarified which crypto activities banks may engage in, and set out when a decentralized finance project counts as genuinely decentralized. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia had pushed for the DeFi language, although he did not ultimately vote to advance the bill.
Several Democratic amendments failed on 11 to 13 votes, according to CryptoSlate. They included proposals from ranking member Elizabeth Warren on tokenization and Treasury sanctions powers over DeFi platforms, and a proposal from Senator Catherine Cortez Masto to narrow liability protections for DeFi software developers. Scott also ruled some amendments out of order, drawing objections from Senator Jack Reed, who argued that offering and voting on amendments is the point of a markup.
Warren opposed the bill throughout, calling the late changes half measures. She also raised the crypto business interests of President Donald Trump’s family, a theme Democrats have pressed for months.
In a statement released by the Senate Banking Committee, Scott called the vote a historic day for the committee and said the bill puts everyday Americans first with clear disclosures, safeguards against fraud and rules that keep markets fair.
Yes votes with conditions
The two Democratic votes came with clear warnings. Alsobrooks said, “My vote today is a vote to keep working in good faith.” Gallego said in a statement that his vote “does not guarantee a vote on the floor,” and indicated he wants stronger ethics provisions before he supports final passage.
That ethics language is the most visible unfinished business. Democrats want rules that would limit senior government officials, including the president, from profiting from the industry they oversee. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt has said such rules should apply “across the board, from the president all the way down to the brand new intern on Capitol Hill,” according to CoinDesk, though it remains unclear what the president will accept. Language on preventing the use of crypto and DeFi tools in financial crime is also still being negotiated.
Banks lost the yield fight, for now
The stablecoin yield compromise struck by Alsobrooks and Republican Senator Thom Tillis on May 1 survived intact. That language bars crypto platforms from paying interest-like returns simply for holding stablecoins while allowing rewards tied to real activity, such as payments.
Banking groups made a final push to tighten it. In the days before the markup, the American Bankers Association urged member bank chief executives to contact senators, and the Bank Policy Institute argued that yield-like stablecoin rewards could draw deposits away from banks and reduce community lending. During the session, a bank-backed amendment to restrict stablecoin rewards further did not get a vote, according to CryptoSlate. The ABA and BPI then issued a joint statement warning that the bill still has “significant flaws.”
For the crypto industry, which saw the January markup collapse over the same issue, the result was a relief. Blockchain Association chief executive Summer Mersinger described the vote as a “defining moment.”
What happens next
The Banking Committee’s bill now has to be combined with the version the Senate Agriculture Committee approved on a party-line vote earlier this year. Banking covers securities and market structure questions under the Securities and Exchange Commission, while Agriculture covers the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s role over digital commodities such as bitcoin. The merged text will need 60 votes on the Senate floor, which means more Democratic support than the committee vote showed. The House, which passed its version 294 to 134 last July, would then have to approve the final bill.
The calendar is tight. The White House has said it wants the bill passed by July 4. Cody Carbone, chief executive of the Digital Chamber, told CoinDesk the Senate vote probably needs to happen by August, an estimate in line with comments from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Floor time is limited ahead of the summer recess and November’s midterm elections, and any long delay could push the bill into next year.
Why it matters
For crypto companies, the Clarity Act would replace years of enforcement-driven uncertainty with written rules: which tokens are securities and which are commodities, how exchanges and brokers register, and what protections customers get. Thursday’s vote does not make that law, but it moves the bill past the committee that had been its main obstacle in the Senate. The next test is whether negotiators can close the ethics and illicit finance gaps quickly enough to find 60 votes before the calendar runs out.