The CLARITY Act — formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, H.R. 3633 — is proposed United States legislation that tries to settle one question: when is a digital asset supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and when does it fall to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission instead?
Why the question matters
Assets whose treatment is already settled in practice gain little from a market-structure statute. The ones that would gain are those still sitting in securities limbo, where the exchange listing them, the custodian holding them and the fund wrapping them each have to make their own judgement about which rulebook applies. That is why the bill is usually described as being about everything other than Bitcoin.
Where it stands
- Passed the House of Representatives 294–134 on 17 July 2025.
- Cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15–9 on 14 May 2026.
- A Senate procedural vote was scheduled for 15 September 2026; the bill had not passed the full Senate as of that date.
A cloture vote is not passage
Cloture ends debate so that a measure can proceed. It requires 60 votes in the Senate and it does not make anything law. After cloture come floor debate, amendments, an actual passage vote, reconciliation with the House text, and a presidential signature. A headline reporting a cloture result is reporting one of several remaining steps, not the outcome.
How MoonWire covers it
See Treasury Sanctioned Two Exchanges the Day the Senate Punted the Crypto Bill and the crypto regulation topic hub. The pattern our coverage keeps finding is that while a statute waits, agencies, sanctions lists, courts and exchanges keep acting under authority they already hold — so a stalled bill is not the same thing as a stalled regulatory year.
What the CLARITY Act is not
It is not a licence, a ban, or a ruling about any particular token, and it is not the GENIUS Act, which addresses payment stablecoins. It is also not a market event in itself: whether a vote advances or fails, the descriptive question afterwards is which rulebook a given asset is filed under, and by whom.