A four-way deadlock is now blocking the US Clarity Act crypto bill — and each side can stop it

The CLARITY Act entered Washington as a bid to impose a durable market structure on crypto. It now sits at the center of a four-way fight over who gets to define that structure, who gets paid inside it, who supervises it, and how much of the existing financial rulebook survives the rewrite. The bill still includes broad language for jurisdictional clarity, with the Senate Banking Committee majority outlining a framework that draws lines between the SEC and the CFTC while adding tailored disclosures and anti-fraud protections. Around that frame, the coalition has fractured into four camps with different definitions of success. Senate and industry backers still want a federal market-structure bill that gives crypto firms a workable path into US regulation. Bank-aligned critics want to seal off stablecoin yield and keep deposit economics from migrating out of the banking system. Regulators have begun moving through their own channels, with the SEC and CFTC signing a new memorandum of understanding and the SEC issuing a fresh interpretation of crypto assets that begins to deliver some of the clarity Congress had reserved for itself. Structural critics still argue the bill would carve crypto out of core investor protections, a case advanced by groups such as Better Markets and by former CFTC Chair Timothy Massad in prior congressional testimony. That collision changed the shape of the bill. What began as a question of statutory design has become a contest over bargaining power. Each camp can slow the process, each camp can claim some version of consumer protection, and each camp enters the next phase with a different source of leverage. Senate and industry backers hold the broadest institutional ambition. Why this matters: The CLARITY Act was intended to anchor crypto within US law, with clear rules for exchanges, tokens, and custody. If it stalls or narrows, firms remain in a patchwork regime shaped by enforcement and agency guidance, while banks retain tighter control over dollar-based financial activity. The outcome will determine whether crypto can compete directly with traditional deposits and payment rails, or operate inside a more constrained perimeter. Related Reading CLARITY Act deadline in weeks could kill stablecoin earnings and push money into Bitcoin A Senate breakthrough on CLARITY could formalize a US market structure in which Bitcoin becomes the clearest institutional winner. Mar 31, 2026 · Gino Matos Banks and their allies hold a choke point around payments, economics, and stablecoin rewards. Regulators hold the power of partial substitution, because every piece of interpretive guidance from the SEC and CFTC narrows the pool of uncertainty that once made CLARITY the singular prize. Structural critics hold a veto over the debate on legitimacy because their argument speaks to a long-standing Washington fear that crypto bills could create bespoke exemptions that would replace the exemptions older laws once carried. The calendar tightened the pressure. In January, Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott said the committee would postpone its markup while bipartisan negotiations continued. Later that month, the Senate Agriculture Committee advanced related market-structure legislation , keeping momentum alive while underlining that the main bottleneck had shifted into the negotiating room. By March, the fight over stablecoin rewards had become the central pressure point in the bill, with public reporting and congressional chatter converging on the same conclusion: a framework bill could move forward only if lawmakers found a way to reconcile crypto’s push for broader utility with banking concerns about disintermediation and deposit competition. That left CLARITY in a familiar Washington posture, broad enough to attract coalitions in theory, specific enough to trigger fracture once the revenue lines came into view. The first two camps are fighting over the economic core of the bill. The first camp still sees CLARITY as the vehicle that can finally anchor crypto market structure in federal statute. That camp includes Senate Republicans who have spent months arguing that the industry needs rules written through Congress rather than through case-by-case enforcement, along with a large swath of the industry that wants a lawful path for token issuance, exchange activity, brokerage, custody, and participation in decentralized networks. The core attraction has always been the same. A federal framework promises a clearer allocation of authority among agencies, a more predictable compliance process, and a narrower zone of ambiguity about what falls under securities law and what falls under commodities regulation. The Senate Banking majority’s summary reflects that approach, leaning on the idea that a single framework can impose definitional order on a market that has spent years operating inside regulatory overlap. For crypto firms, the appeal runs deeper than process. A statute holds out the prospect of capital form