What is the CLARITY Act? The crypto market-structure bill and the stablecoin yield fight

The CLARITY Act is a 630-page US market-structure bill that would hand spot trading of digital commodities to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, leave token-sale disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and forbid crypto platforms from paying interest on stablecoin balances. Senate Republicans released the current text on 10 September 2026, and the chamber's first procedural vote on it is set for 15 September 2026 at 2:15pm ET.

That vote does not pass the bill. It decides whether the Senate starts debating one that, five days out, no Democrat had publicly agreed to support.

So what does the bill actually do, and what is the fight really about?

The vehicle is a House bill with everything after the enacting clause removed

Formally this is an amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 3633 in the 119th Congress, and it opens by instructing the clerk to "Strike all after the enacting clause and insert the following". The short title inside is the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The stated purpose is "to provide for a system of regulation of the offer and sale of digital commodities by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission", plus a ban on Federal Reserve banks offering retail accounts and on using a central bank digital currency for monetary policy.

Four divisions carry it: the Banking Committee's ten titles, a two-title Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act, a set of ethics requirements, and an effective date. Most of the Act switches on 360 days after enactment. And anything that needs a rule waits for the later of that date and 60 days after the final rule hits the Federal Register.

So nothing in here binds you in 2026, whatever Tuesday does.

The CFTC gets the spot market, and $150m to police it

Here is the split, in one clause. The CFTC "shall have exclusive jurisdiction with respect to any account, agreement, contract, or transaction involving a contract of sale of a digital commodity in interstate commerce, including in a digital commodity cash or spot market", where that happens on or through a registered entity. A separate preemption section hands the commission exclusive jurisdiction over anyone registered under the intermediaries division, while leaving states their fraud and manipulation cases.

Over on the SEC's half, a new section 4B of the Securities Act is built on a coinage, the "ancillary asset", meaning "a network token, the value of which is dependent upon the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of an ancillary asset originator or a related person, as those concepts are further specified by the Commission by regulation."

Read that last clause again, because it is probably the whole bill in miniature. Congress writes the category and then hands the boundary to the agency. So five years of Howey litigation become a defined term with disclosure duties attached and a rulemaking to follow.

There is money attached too: $150,000,000, "to remain available until expended, until the Commission has established and is collecting registration fees". Roughly speaking, the smaller of the two agencies is being handed the larger market.

Section 10404 bans stablecoin interest, then allows rewards calculated from your balance

Paragraph (c)(1) is absolute. No covered party may "pay any form of interest or yield (whether in cash, tokens, or other consideration)" to a US customer "solely in connection with the holding" of their stablecoins, or on a balance in a way "economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit."

Paragraph (2) carves out "rewards or incentives based on bona fide activities or bona fide transactions" that are not equivalent to deposit interest. Then paragraph (3)(B) adds that permitted rewards "may be calculated by reference to a balance, duration, tenure, or any combination of the foregoing."

A payment computed from a balance and a duration is interest. That is what the word means. What the bill forbids is not the formula but a characterisation, and the defining of that characterisation goes to the CFTC, the SEC and the Treasury Secretary jointly, by notice-and-comment rulemaking, within a year of enactment. And paragraph (5) grants a platform that structured a programme in "good faith reliance" on the exemption 90 days to come into compliance, penalty-free.

Did August's lobbying move any of it? Both PDFs came off Senator Lummis's own site, and we stripped the line numbers and page furniture and compared the word streams. Section 10404 is 2,288 words in the 22 July text and 2,288 words in the 10 September text, and the two hash to the same value — which is the diff we published in The new CLARITY Act text is 14 pages longer. The stablecoin yield section is unchanged, word for word.

The dates and thresholds that actually bind:

Item	Value
First Senate procedural vote	15 September 2026, 2:15pm ET
Bill length, 10 September text	630 pages (616 on 22 July)
Section 10404	2,288 words, unchanged since 22 July
Joint CFTC, SEC and Treasury rulemaking	within 1 year of enactment
Good-faith compliance window	90 days, no penalty
General effective date	360 days after enactment
CFTC authorisation	$150,000,000 until fees cover it

The lobbying is a deposit fight wearing a crypto costume

On 10 September, all 77 state bankers associations, with the Independent Community Bankers of America and the American Bankers Association, wrote to Senate leadership urging lawmakers "to strengthen provisions of the Clarity Act governing stablecoin interest, yield and rewards programs", so that stablecoins "function as transactional tools rather than store-of-value products that compete directly with bank deposits."

That is the banks' whole case, and it seems a reasonable one. If a platform can pay you a rate on an idle balance, a community bank's cheapest funding walks.

Against them, Stand With Crypto says supporters contacted Congress nearly 50,000 times in August, and Lummis's own release lists BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab and SoFi as supporters, alongside police organisations that dropped their opposition. We walked through the economics of the rewards fight in The CLARITY Act vote on September 15 is really a vote on whether a stablecoin can pay you 6 percent.

Both campaigns ran all August. Not a comma moved.

What happens after the vote

So what happens if cloture succeeds? Floor debate and amendments, then a passage vote, then the Senate and House have to produce one text. Lummis says the bill already carries "more than 114 separate provisions at my Democrat colleagues' request"; The Block reported on 10 September that Politico counted no Democratic support for the version released that day. A hundred and fourteen concessions and no votes is probably not a drafting problem.

What would change this answer

A floor amendment striking paragraph (c)(3)(B) is the single most informative thing that could happen, and it would tell you the calculation-by-reference sentence was an accident rather than a design. We would bet against it: that sentence reads like the thing somebody negotiated for.

If cloture fails, the bill does not die so much as slip past the midterm calendar, and the CFTC and SEC write rules anyway — which is the argument Lummis herself makes for passing it. If cloture succeeds and the text survives, the fight moves to a joint rulemaking docket at three agencies, with a one-year clock and a non-exhaustive list of permitted rewards that lobbyists will spend that year populating.

Either way, the interesting reading is likely not the bill at all. Watch the comment file, twelve months from enactment, where somebody will argue in writing that a payment calculated from your balance and your tenure is not interest.

Which side of that argument do you want your money on?