Updated Jul 9, 2026, 7:38 p.m. Published Jul 9, 2026, 7:34 p.m.
4 min read
Summary
- Lawmakers may drop a new version of the Clarity Act as soon as next week, people following the effort told CoinDesk.
- The new version of the bill will combine the efforts from the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committees, though there are still outstanding issues to resolve, including ethics, a key ask for Senate Democrats.
- Democrats will still need to buy into the new draft, which would need 60 votes to advance out of the Senate.
The U.S. Senate legislation that would regulate the crypto industry is wobbling forward in what are likely its final days as a viable effort for 2026, and advocates expect a new draft could emerge as soon as next week for potential Senate action later in the month.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act has just a few weeks left to advance in the Senate before the chamber's calendar and wider congressional politics leave its chances close to zero, but those briefed on the negotiations say they've seen some headway, including a new text that's come together in the merger of the efforts from the two relevant Senate committees: Banking and Agriculture.
However, legislative staffers signalled that the effort hasn't yet secured Democratic buy-in it'll need, despite much of the latest material representing a response to their concerns.
The unified version of the Clarity Act — which is said by one person to have had more than 70 pages of text added — hasn't yet solidified a position on the major sticking point: A Democrat-demanded restriction keeping senior government officials (including the president) from maintaining business ties with the crypto sector. Without a compromise on such ethics limits, several lawmakers have said they won't vote yes on a final bill.
The merged text that may be released next week will not represent a simple combination of the two bills the respective committees voted to approve earlier this year. Both committees' members negotiated on outstanding issues — the Agriculture Committee more so, given that bill was voted out of committee on strictly partisan lines — and the updated bill is said to reflect the results of that process, putting more emphasis on consumer protections.
The bill's advocates expect it to reach the Senate floor as soon as the week of July 20, though the lawmakers have a lot of work left.
Beyond ethics, outstanding issues include federal preemption, and negotiators still need to come to a final agreement on filling the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Earlier Thursday, the White House sent a letter to Senators John Thune and Chuck Schumer, respectively the majority and minority heads in the Senate, saying Democrats had not put forward any names for the minority roles on these commissions.
Last month, a letter from Democratic senators had criticized Trump and Majority Leader John Thune for refusing "in almost every instance to engage with Senate Democratic leadership in the normal process of identifying Democratic nominees to fill vacancies on independent agencies. Instead, the White House appears set on leaving the vast majority of these critical positions open indefinitely."
The Clarity Act will need a significant number of Democrats to get on board before it can clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate. So far, even the two Democrats who voted to advance the Banking Committee's version warned that they may not approve the final version if it doesn't answer their outstanding concerns, including the ethics provision. The White House also hasn't signed off on the merged text, or engaged in the most recent negotiations.
But elsewhere, another sign of hope appeared in a Wednesday letter from Senator Ron Wyden to Senate leadership that the Oregon Democrat supported the way the earlier legislation handled the legal protections for developers — specifically the section of Clarity known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, which would ensure crypto developers wouldn't be treated under federal regulations as money transmitters if they're not handling customer assets. The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has made preserving the BRCA a top aim in the Clarity negotiations.
Though some of the crypto industry's DC insiders had begun to express private uncertainty about the Clarity Act's survival, the effort hasn't yet reached its fatal deadline for getting done before the summer congressional break and the shift of attention to the fall midterm elections.
The Senate calendar includes three remaining weeks in July and the first week of August. However, the process to advance the legislation could take a few days of that time, meaning there's scant runway left for a 2026 takeoff.
Also, the U.S. House of Representatives would need to approve the Senate's version before it could become law, so the process would await the action of a House that's been nearly paralyzed by Republican infighting. And it would then head to the desk of President Donald Trump for a signature to make it law, though the president has refused to sign another popular piece of legislation — the Senate's bipartisan housing bill — as he insists that Congress needs to prioritize his demands for new voting rules.
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