The new CLARITY Act runs 14 pages longer. The stablecoin yield section is unchanged, word for word
A word-level diff of the July and September texts from Senator Lummis's own site shows a month of lobbying moved nothing, including the clause that lets a permitted reward be calculated from your balance.
For a month the stablecoin industry and the community bankers fought over a single section of the CLARITY Act. Neither of them moved a word of it.
Senate Republicans released a revised bill on 10 September 2026, 630 pages against 616 in the July draft, with the first procedural vote set for 15 September at 2:15pm ET. Section 10404, "Prohibiting interest and yield on payment stablecoins", runs 2,288 words. We pulled both PDFs from Senator Cynthia Lummis's own site, ran them through pdftotext, stripped the line numbers and the page furniture, and compared the two word streams. They hash to the same value. Every subsection, every carve-out, every semicolon: identical.
Stand With Crypto says its supporters contacted Congress nearly 50,000 times in August. The bankers ran television. The page they were arguing about had been settled since 22 July.
What the untouched section actually does
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 stablecoins, or on a balance in a way "economically or functionally equivalent" to interest on a bank deposit. Paragraph (2) then permits rewards for "bona fide activities". And four subparagraphs later comes the sentence that carries the whole argument.
Payments to restricted recipients of consideration, rewards, or benefits that are permissible pursuant to paragraph (2) and subparagraph (A) of this paragraph may be calculated by reference to a balance, duration, tenure, or any combination of the foregoing.
A payment calculated from a balance and a duration is interest. That is the arithmetic of it. The bill does not outlaw the formula. It outlaws a characterisation — "economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit" — and then hands the defining of that characterisation to the CFTC, the SEC and the Treasury Secretary jointly, by notice-and-comment rulemaking, within a year of enactment.
So what does Tuesday's vote decide? Not the rate. The referee. If you were waiting for the Senate to tell you whether your stablecoin balance can earn, it will not.
We had the line right and the calendar wrong
On 9 September we wrote that the bill would land on rewards permitted for activity and prohibited as a passive rate on idle balances, and that this was the line both sides could claim. The line is right. The timing was wrong, and the diff says so: it was drawn in July, and August was spent lobbying a settled page.
The honest case against us is that a section goes untouched because it is agreed, not because pressure failed, and that leaving it alone is what a deal looks like. Fair. But look at what the bankers got for their month. A sense-of-Congress paragraph with no operative force, an anti-evasion clause, and paragraph (5), which gives a platform that structured a rewards programme in "good faith reliance" ninety days to come into compliance with no penalty. If you are designing a yield product, that is a free trial of your own legal theory.
The new material in the fourteen extra pages went elsewhere: non-decentralised finance trading protocols must now register with the CFTC and come under the Bank Secrecy Act, the DeFi provisions are limited to spot and cash digital commodity transactions, and credit union powers are clarified. Lummis says the bill carries "more than 114 separate provisions at my Democrat colleagues' request" and that Democrats "got almost everything they asked for". Politico reported the same day that none of them support it.
A hundred and fourteen provisions, no votes, five days out.
We would expect 10404 to be enacted roughly as drafted, the fight to move to a joint rulemaking docket that almost nobody will read, and a large platform to relaunch a balance-referenced "rewards" product under (c)(3)(B) within eighteen months of those rules landing. A floor amendment striking (c)(3)(B) before Tuesday would tell us we have misread who wrote that paragraph and why.
The rulemaking deadline is one year after enactment. Watch the comment file.
