CLARITY Act Is Almost Done After House Win as Senate Vote Nears

CLARITY Act compromise narrows the Senate path

The central negotiation now appears narrower than it did a month ago. The reported landing zone, consistent with our earlier write-up on the latest stablecoin deal, appears designed to stop passive yield paid just for parking dollar tokens while preserving some payment, loyalty, or activity-based rewards. The final Senate text was still not public, so the exact carve-outs were not immediately clear.

That framework matches how Senate Banking Republicans described the bill in a Jan. 13 fact sheet: a clearer SEC-CFTC split, developer protections for software and peer-to-peer activity, and tougher tools against money laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasion. Supporters see that package as the version most likely to let crypto adoption scale inside a U.S. legal perimeter rather than through offshore workarounds.

Treasury’s posture has also shifted in a way that helps the Senate case. Cointelegraph reported on April 9 that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had urged Congress to move without delay, arguing that U.S. leadership in digital assets and tokenized assets is at stake. Read alongside Treasury’s new cybersecurity information-sharing initiative for the digital asset industry, the message is that Washington increasingly treats crypto infrastructure as part of the financial system, not a side market.

Coinbase still shadows the CLARITY Act deal

That hopeful adoption case still runs into the same political obstacle: Coinbase’s incentives. The exchange has spent months fighting over stablecoin-reward language, the same pressure point behind our Patrick Witt warning and the backlash tracked in our sabotage coverage.

Recent reporting said Coinbase representatives were still raising concerns with lawmakers about the newest compromise. That does not prove the company wants the bill to fail, but it does support the inference that Coinbase has repeatedly tried to shape the final deal around the part of the market it monetizes best.

That is hard to separate from Coinbase’s trust-charter push. A federally wrapped custody and payments strategy gets more valuable if the company can also defend the economics of keeping customer dollar balances on-platform. The sabotage narrative may be too strong as a legal accusation, but the incentive conflict is real and still central to the Senate talks.

Bitcoin and sentiment still trade like the vote is unfinished

That restraint is visible across the tape. Polymarket showed 67% when checked on April 11, but the contract has mostly sat around 66% and has not materially repriced the latest Senate optimism. Bitcoin has recovered sharply over two weeks, yet the Fear and Greed Index still printed 15, or Extreme Fear, which suggests traders remain cautious until a real committee date appears.

Food for thought: Treasury’s April 9 cybersecurity initiative for the digital-asset industry landed just as Reuters reported that Scott Bessent and Jerome Powell had convened major bank CEOs over the cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s Mythos model. If AI is shifting from a productivity story to a trust and fragility story for finance, CLARITY starts to look less like a niche crypto bill and more like legal groundwork for auditable, cryptographic market rails.

That is the hopeful adoption read on this whole episode. A bill that splits SEC and CFTC authority and gives banks, exchanges, and fintechs a clearer path to build could widen institutional participation even if the final stablecoin terms are imperfect.

What remains unknown is straightforward but consequential: when Senate Banking posts a markup, whether the compromise text keeps both bank and crypto factions inside the tent, and whether the floor calendar leaves enough room before midterm politics harden. Until those dates are public, the CLARITY Act is closest not to certainty, but to the point where rhetoric finally has to become procedure.