Senate Panel Gears Up for Clarity Act Markup as Amendment Count Tops 100

The Senate Banking Committee will begin marking up the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Thursday with more than 100 amendments filed to the 309-page bill, pushing the most significant piece of U.S. crypto legislation into a negotiation phase that will test whether the bipartisan coalition that carried it through the House can hold.

Scheduled for May 14, the markup arrives roughly ten months after the House passed its version 294-134, with 78 Democrats crossing the aisle. The Senate draft, released by the Banking Committee late Monday, preserves the core architecture of exchange registration, token classification, and stablecoin oversight while opening new fronts on yield-bearing products, ethics rules, and liability protections for decentralized finance developers. Polymarket odds for the Clarity Act being signed into law in 2026 sit at 60 percent, reflecting a baseline expectation that Senate Banking can advance a version of the bill even if the ethics fight and floor scheduling complicate the calendar.

“It puts consumers first, combats illicit finance, cracks down on criminals and foreign adversaries, and keeps the future of finance here in the United States,” Committee Chairman Tim Scott said in a statement ahead of the markup. “Now it is time to move forward.”

The amendment stack, filed ahead of the Tuesday evening deadline, has turned what was conceived as a market-structure bill into a three-front negotiation. More than a hundred proposed changes signals that nearly every provision of the bill has at least one senator willing to contest it.

Stablecoin yield is the most immediate flashpoint. The draft prohibits interest-bearing stablecoin products but carves out a “rewards” designation that issuers could use to return value to holders. Banking lobbyists and several Republican members view the rewards language as regulatory arbitrage in consumer-facing packaging. Democratic senators allied with crypto innovators want the opposite — explicit authorization for yield-bearing stablecoins — arguing that prohibiting interest entrenches the banking sector’s structural advantage in deposit markets.

A second contested zone has opened around ethics provisions advanced by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s coalition. Those amendments would bar public officials and their immediate families from holding or profiting from stablecoins and other digital assets covered under the bill. Republican aides have signaled privately that the language is a non-starter, framing it as a bill-killer designed to fracture the majority that delivered 78 House Democratic votes.

The third fight is over DeFi liability. Lobbying from the banking industry targets safe-harbor language that would shield decentralized protocol developers from certain SEC and CFTC enforcement actions. Banks argue it amounts to a backdoor exemption from anti-money-laundering requirements. Industry groups counter that without some form of developer protection, the legislation’s stated goal of keeping blockchain innovation within U.S. jurisdiction carries no weight.

All three disputes sit on top of the bill’s central framework, which itself represents a landmark shift. The Clarity Act would draw a statutory line between digital commodities and securities — a distinction that federal courts have litigated piecemeal for years rather than Congress establishing — and create registration pathways for trading platforms, custodians, and stablecoin issuers that have operated in regulatory grey territory since the initial coin offering boom of 2017. For an industry accustomed to enforcement-first oversight from the SEC and CFTC, the bill amounts to a workable federal perimeter where none currently exists.

Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican co-sponsor, projected confidence. “I look forward to Congress quickly passing this legislation and sending it to President Trump’s desk soon,” he said.

Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis, who has shepherded much of the bill’s technical architecture through the subcommittee process, is expected to play a central role during the markup in deciding which amendments get a committee vote and which are held for floor debate, where leadership would have more room to negotiate.

The committee is expected to work through the amendment stack over one or two sessions. If the bill emerges from markup with bipartisan support intact, floor action could come before the August recess — a timeline that would put comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation on President Trump’s desk roughly a year after the House first passed the measure in July 2025. Crypto markets have traded with a risk-on tilt ahead of the markup, as traders price in the probability that a federal regulatory framework will remove a structural overhang that has kept some institutional capital on the sidelines since the FTX collapse reshaped the industry’s Washington posture.

Whether the amendment process strengthens the bill’s coalition or pulls it apart is the open question heading into Thursday. The three flashpoints — yield, ethics, and DeFi liability — are not marginal. Each touches a constituency the bill needs to reach 60 votes on the Senate floor.