CLARITY Act Clears Senate Banking Committee In 15-9 Vote

The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote on May 14, moving the U.S. crypto market-structure bill into its next and harder phase.

The committee’s executive session considered H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, after months of delays tied to stablecoin rewards, anti-money-laundering rules, DeFi treatment, developer protections, and political ethics demands. The vote sends the bill forward, but it does not make the measure law. The Senate still needs to reconcile Banking Committee language with Agriculture Committee work, secure floor time, clear the 60-vote threshold, and align with the House-passed framework before final passage.

The 15-9 margin shows progress, but also exposes the next political test. The bill drew Republican support and two Democratic yes votes, with Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks backing the measure in committee. Alsobrooks also signaled that floor support would depend on unresolved issues being addressed, keeping the bill’s bipartisan path open but not settled.

Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott framed the bill as a market-structure framework rather than an industry giveaway. “This legislation does not take sides between traditional finance and new technology, or Republicans and Democrats,” he said at the start of the markup, according to Reuters.

Thin Democratic Support Keeps Floor Fight Alive

The committee vote gives crypto firms a real win after the January process stalled, but the narrow Democratic crossover leaves the Senate floor fight unresolved. The CLARITY Act will need at least seven Democratic votes in the full Senate if all Republicans support it and the bill faces a filibuster.

Before the markup, Galaxy Research warned that the margin of Democratic support would shape the bill’s floor odds. Galaxy’s analysis treated a bipartisan vote as the cleaner path and warned that a party-line result would weaken the bill’s prospects. The actual result landed between those scenarios: enough Democratic support to avoid a party-line headline, but not enough to prove the 60-vote path is secure.

That is why the markup result matters beyond the vote count. The CLARITY Act is designed to draw clearer federal lines between SEC and CFTC oversight, create registration paths for digital commodity intermediaries, preserve certain software developer protections, and impose Bank Secrecy Act-style compliance duties on covered crypto exchanges, brokers, and dealers.

The stablecoin section remains one of the bill’s most contested pieces. The latest Senate text bans rewards on idle stablecoin balances that resemble deposit interest, while allowing rewards tied to activity such as transactions and platform use. That compromise helped pull the bill back into motion after months of pressure from banks and crypto firms.

Warren, Ethics Amendments And Stablecoin Rules Stay In Focus

The markup still showed how much resistance remains. Senator Elizabeth Warren said the bill was too favorable to the crypto industry and warned that it could put consumers, national security, and the financial system at risk. She also pushed amendments focused on illicit finance, sanctions authority, retirement-account protections, and supervisory information tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Several of those proposals failed on narrow committee votes.

Senator Chris Van Hollen also proposed an ethics amendment aimed at elected officials and their families holding crypto-related business interests. The amendment failed 11-13, leaving political-conflict language as one of the issues likely to return before any full Senate vote.

Industry support strengthened before the markup. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong had already backed the latest compromise, saying the bill was in the strongest position seen so far after the stablecoin-yield language moved closer to a workable deal. That shift helped reverse the earlier Coinbase-led resistance that contributed to the January delay.

Crypto markets had already started positioning around the policy catalyst, with Bitcoin and major assets moving higher ahead of the Senate CLARITY Act vote after several sessions of ETF outflows and technical pressure. The committee result also follows earlier signs that the bill had secured enough support to survive the markup, a setup tracked as CLARITY Act majority support formed before the vote.

The next concrete checkpoints are Senate Agriculture alignment, possible ethics language, stablecoin reward amendments, and whether leadership can build a 60-vote coalition before the legislative calendar tightens. The committee vote moves CLARITY forward, but the full Senate will decide whether the U.S. crypto rulebook gets a real path to President Trump’s desk in 2026.

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