Crypto market structure bill faces a make-or-break Senate vote

Senate Republicans released new text of the CLARITY Act ahead of a critical vote², and the bill faces a make-or-break Senate vote on Tuesday as the crypto industry pushes for passage¹. The procedural test is a cloture vote requiring 60 votes⁵. The final draft runs to 635 pages^6,7.

Two changes got it there. Trump agreed to new ethics rules to move the bill across the line, according to Republicans¹¹, and one account said the odds rose after he approved the new ethics provisions⁴. Separately, the bill now includes a compromise on stablecoin yield aimed at appeasing banking interests, directing the Treasury secretary to restrict rewards¹ if stablecoin activity causes deposit flight from community banks on a substantial scale⁸. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted support for the final draft⁹ and defended the approach³.

Why it matters to investors

The stablecoin yield provision is the live commercial fight. Banks escalated their opposition to stablecoin rewards on the ground that those rewards compete directly with bank deposits³. One analysis called the new Treasury authority a “panic button” that lacks a manual, since the power to throttle stablecoin rewards is granted without a clear trigger or procedure⁷.

The ethics provisions cut close to the presidency itself. The act targets officials’ crypto holdings¹⁰, and Trump disclosed in June that he had made 1.4 billion dollars from his crypto ventures². His family launched World Liberty Financial, a decentralised finance platform⁴; onchain records show an 800 million dollar stake in its token now has a timetable to becoming sellable¹⁰.

Forecasts of passage remain low. One tracker put the bill’s chances at 32 percent⁶, and American Banker’s read was that the new text on stablecoin yield still leaves passage unlikely¹².

What to watch

The cloture count itself. Sixty votes is the gate, and everything about the bill’s market-structure and stablecoin provisions is downstream of clearing it^1,5.

Whether bank lobbying peels off votes over the rewards compromise, which is the one issue both sides have escalated rather than settled^3,8. And whether the ethics language survives the floor in the form Trump accepted^4,11, since that is what the crypto industry traded for its market-structure rules.