Washington restarts the engines. Paul Atkins, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the regulator of American financial markets, says he expects the CLARITY Act to take a new step as early as this month. In the process, the Senate included in its calendar a procedural vote on the text, set for September 15.
After the GENIUS Act on stablecoins, the major law on market structure remains the unfinished business of American crypto. The one that will finally settle the billion-dollar question: who regulates what, between the SEC and the CFTC.
Key Points
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins says he expects progress on the CLARITY Act this month
The Senate listed a motion to close the text on September 15, which requires 60 votes to pass.
The CLARITY Act would divide powers between SEC and CFTC and protect self-custody and non-custodial DeFi
The Trump family's crypto activities remain the main sticking point on the Democratic side
Atkins pushes, the SEC has already cleared the ground
Since his arrival at the head of the agency, Paul Atkins has methodically undone the legal legacy of his predecessor Gary Gensler. Abandoned lawsuits against Coinbase, Ripple or Kraken, creation of a Crypto Task Force entrusted to Commissioner Hester Peirce, adoption of generic listing standards which opened the floodgates to spot ETFs on altcoins, then launch of “Project Crypto”, the program supposed to migrate part of the American financial markets onto blockchain rails.
The problem is structural. Everything that the SEC builds through regulation, a future administration can undo just as quickly, with a simple change of doctrine or commission chairman. Atkins makes no secret of it: without a text passed by Congress, the rules of the game remain revocable at any time. Hence his insistence on seeing the CLARITY Act progress, and his stated expectation of progress in the coming weeks.
The issue goes beyond the legal comfort of exchanges. As long as the status of a token depends on a case-by-case interpretation of the Howey test, inherited from a 1946 Supreme Court ruling on citrus plantations, every protocol launch in the United States is done with a lawyer in ambush.
What the CLARITY Act would actually change
Adopted by the House of Representatives by 294 votes to 134, including 78 Democrats, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act establishes a simple architecture on paper. Digital assets that are sufficiently decentralized fall into the category of “digital commodities”, supervised by the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the American authority on derivatives and commodities markets. The others remain within the fold of the SEC.
The text introduces several mechanisms long awaited by the industry:
the notion of a mature blockchain system, a decentralization threshold allowing an asset to exit the securities regime;
a dedicated registration regime for platforms, brokers and market makers in digital assets, with obligation to segregate client funds;
explicit protections for self-custody of private keys and for developers of non-custodial DeFi protocols;
a transitional regime allowing players already in activity to declare themselves without waiting for the rules to be finalized.
For the CFTC, which would inherit the supervision of spot markets, the question of resources remains unresolved: the agency operates with a budget and staff incommensurate with those of the SEC. Several Democratic senators have made this a blocking argument, considering it unrealistic to entrust it with a market worth several trillion dollars without budgetary expansion.
The wall of 60 voices
The vote of September 15 is not a vote on the merits. This is a closure motion, the procedure that ends debate and allows a final vote to proceed. It requires 60 votes out of 100. With 53 Republican seats, the majority must convince at least seven Democrats, and probably more if a few elected conservatives hostile to the text break away.
Negotiations have been stumbling for months on a non-technical point: the crypto activities of the Trump family, from World Liberty Financial to its mining ventures. Elizabeth Warren has made it her hobby horse, calling for anti-conflict of interest provisions that the Republicans refuse to include in the text. Opposite, a group of Democratic senators led by Ruben Gallego, Kirsten Gillibrand and Angela Alsobrooks are negotiating an amended version step by step, as they did for stablecoins.
The industry does not intend to remain a spectator. The Fairshake political action committee, funded by Coinbase, Ripple and a16z, has more than $250 million on hand for the November midterm elections. An argument that few elected officials ignore four months before an election.
There remains the arithmetic of the calendar. Even adopted by the Senate, the text should go back to the House to reconcile the two versions before any presidential signature. And a rejected closure motion almost never comes up on the agenda in the same parliamentary session.
