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Morning Edition · Friday, September 11, 2026Published at 1:49 AM EDT · New York
Senate Republicans Rewrite the Clarity Act's DeFi Rules Four Days Before a 60-Vote Test
The new draft tells the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Treasury to write registration rules for protocols that any person or group can control or materially alter, while three unresolved disputes still block the bill.
Senate Republicans circulated a fresh draft of the Clarity Act on Thursday, days before the chamber returns from recess and votes on whether to proceed to floor debate. The bill needs 60 votes to clear that procedural step.
The revision centers the fight on protocol design. The updated text sets out when decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that are decentralized in name only must register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), confines the DeFi provisions to spot and cash transactions, and directs the CFTC and the Treasury to write rules covering trading systems that an identifiable person or group can control or materially alter. That is a legal test of who holds admin power, not of what a website claims.
Three disputes remain unresolved: ethics language aimed at the president's personal crypto income, developer liability for writing DeFi code, and the treatment of yield paid on stablecoin balances, which directly affects exchange revenue. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Senate to pass the bill, and Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong said publicly that he expects passage. A new draft this close to a vote usually signals that sponsors are still short of the votes.
Veracity: Corroborated
91/100- If true, who benefits
Exchanges and large protocol operators, whose stablecoin yield revenue and DeFi registration exposure turn on the exact wording, alongside a Treasury Department pressing for a statute that replaces agency discretion.
- The nuance
Part of a tracked trend
Crypto Market-Structure Bill Stalls in the Senate
Ethics disputes over the president's personal crypto ventures keep displacing the substance of United States market-structure legislation, leaving digital-asset rules dependent on agency discretion rather than statute.
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