#Polymarket每日热点 CLARITY Act: How Far Is It from the Committee to the President's Signature?

Early this morning, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee passed the CLARITY Act with a bipartisan vote of 15 to 9, advancing it to the next stage. Following this news, Coinb surged 10% in a single day, and BTC violently jumped from 78,000 to 82,000. But Circle was already priced in, rising first, then crashing, and rebounding again. A standard "good news realization."
Today is just one step in the long legislative marathon. For the bill to truly become the foundational law for the U.S. crypto market, there are still many hurdles and unresolved disagreements ahead.
 
Step 1: Merging the versions of both chambers.
Currently, there are two parallel versions—the version recently passed by the Senate Banking Committee, and the version earlier approved by the House Agriculture Committee. The two texts differ in details such as regulatory authority division and stablecoin framework, requiring negotiators from both chambers to sit down and coordinate line by line to form a unified text. This process is often time-consuming and full of political bargaining.
Step 2: Full Senate vote. The unified text must be submitted for a full chamber vote. Under current procedural rules, if a "filibuster" occurs, it actually takes 60 votes to advance—meaning the Republicans must secure support from at least 7 Democratic senators, far more than the two votes in the committee stage. Gallego and Alsobrooks’ statements also confirm this uncertainty: committee approval does not equal full chamber approval.
Step 3: Full House vote. After passing the Senate, the bill must be submitted for a full House vote. While only a simple majority is needed in the House, there is a clear division within party factions on crypto regulation, and whether it can pass smoothly remains uncertain.
Step 4: Presidential signature. After both chambers pass the bill, it is sent to the President for signature to become law.
The time window is extremely limited. Cody Carbone, president of the Digital Chamber of Commerce, explicitly stated that the bill must be completed before the August congressional summer recess, or it will be indefinitely shelved due to recess and the subsequent preparations for the 2026 midterm elections. From now until August, only about three months remain.
Three core contentious points
Controversy Point 1: The boundaries of anti-money laundering (AML/CFT) provisions
This is currently the most technically challenging dispute. Democrats insist on including stricter AML and counter-terrorism financing provisions in the bill, requiring crypto projects to bear compliance obligations comparable to traditional financial institutions.
The core issue is: should decentralized protocols be considered "financial institutions," and should their developers or liquidity providers be subject to "Know Your Customer" (KYC) obligations?
Industry players believe that enforcing KYC on permissionless protocols is technically nearly impossible and would stifle innovation; regulators worry that without barriers, the crypto sector could become a hotbed for money laundering and sanctions evasion. This disagreement currently lacks consensus and directly influences how Democrats like Gallego and Alsobrooks will ultimately vote.
Controversy Point 2: Ethical restrictions on government officials participating in the crypto industry
This clause seems unrelated to technical regulation but is an important bargaining chip for Democrats. Some legislators and civil organizations demand that current government officials—even including former officials—be explicitly prohibited from holding or promoting specific crypto assets within their official duties. The emergence of this clause is closely related to controversies involving Trump family-owned crypto project World Liberty Financial and the President’s personal crypto holdings. The Republican side strongly opposes this, viewing it as a partisan attack. Carbone believes the ethical clause can be agreed upon before the full chamber vote, but the details of negotiations have not yet been made public.
Controversy Point 3: Regulatory jurisdiction over DeFi and staked assets
This is a deep legal classification issue: should decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols be under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), or both? The bill currently attempts to classify based on whether "assets possess decentralization attributes," but the standard for "full decentralization" remains vague. Meanwhile, whether staking yields constitute "securities" is still debated. The question of regulatory authority affects not only compliance costs but also the entire industry’s business model, with lobbying from interested parties being intensely fierce.
Conclusion
The CLARITY Act is in the "last mile" and also the "most difficult mile." Bipartisan cooperation at the committee stage is encouraging, but the political arithmetic for a full chamber vote is far more complex. Any collapse on the three major contentious points—AML boundaries, officials’ ethical restrictions, DeFi regulation jurisdiction—could cause the bill to stall again. The countdown to August has already begun.