CLARITY Act 2026: Who Regulates Your Crypto?
A House-passed bill sits one Senate vote away from deciding whether the CFTC or the SEC regulates most of the crypto market. Here's the split it would create, what's governing crypto in the meantime, and why the vote keeps slipping.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY Act, H.R. 3633) would split US federal crypto oversight between two agencies: the CFTC would take spot markets and "digital commodities," the SEC would keep token sales, fundraising, and anything meeting the legal definition of a security. It passed the House in July 2025 by a 294-134 vote. As of August 6, 2026, it still hasn't had a Senate floor vote, is formally eligible for one, and Senate leadership says a vote will happen before the chamber leaves for its August recess — though the 60 votes needed to get there aren't confirmed. In the meantime, a March 2026 joint SEC-CFTC interpretation is already doing informally much of what the Act would make permanent by statute.
TL;DR
- The CLARITY Act would give the CFTC jurisdiction over crypto spot markets and "digital commodities," and leave the SEC in charge of digital securities, token sales, and disclosure rules
- It passed the House 294-134 in July 2025; the Senate has not yet held a floor vote
- A March 17, 2026 joint SEC-CFTC interpretation already sorts crypto assets into five categories and is functioning as a stopgap — but it's guidance, not law, and a future administration could unwind it
- The Senate vote keeps slipping on a handful of unresolved issues, principally an ethics provision on senior officials' personal ties to the crypto industry
- Missing the pre-recess window doesn't change anything for existing exchanges or tokens immediately — it mainly pushes the realistic timeline for a permanent law into 2027
Status as of August 6, 2026
The bill is formally eligible for a Senate floor vote — it's been sitting on the Legislative Calendar since June 1, 2026. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on August 3 that a vote would happen before the chamber's August recess, which begins around August 10. As of this writing, no cloture motion had been filed and the bill was absent from the published floor schedule for the first days of that week. Senator Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the Senate's digital-assets subcommittee, said on August 5 that the chamber may stay in session past its original Friday deadline specifically to get a vote on the board. "I don't think we will be leaving on Friday," she told Fox Business. Prediction markets were pricing the odds of the bill becoming law in 2026 at roughly 30-33% at the time of writing. This section will need a check immediately before publish — the timeline has moved by the day for weeks.
What the CLARITY Act Would Actually Split
The bill's core function is jurisdictional: deciding which of two federal regulators oversees which part of the crypto market.
The CFTC's side would cover spot trading in "digital commodities" — tokens that derive their value from a functioning, sufficiently decentralized network rather than from the effort of an identifiable group of promoters. This is the category most trading activity on major exchanges falls into once a network matures past its early fundraising stage.
The SEC's side stays with anything that meets the legal test for a security: token sales and fundraising events, and digital assets whose value still depends on the promised efforts of a centralized team. Disclosure and registration requirements — the paperwork obligations that come with raising money from the public — remain SEC territory under this framework.
| CFTC | SEC | |
|---|---|---|
| Core jurisdiction | Spot markets, "digital commodities" | Digital securities, token sales & fundraising |
| Typical asset | A mature, decentralized network token (e.g. ether under current guidance) | A token still tied to a centralized team's promised efforts |
| Registration/disclosure | Not required for digital commodities | Required for securities offerings |
| Anti-fraud & manipulation authority | Yes, within commodity markets | Yes, within securities markets |
Anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority doesn't split cleanly along that same line. Both agencies keep enforcement power in their respective lanes: the CFTC over manipulation and fraud in commodity markets, the SEC over the same conduct in securities markets. A token can start in one category and move to the other as a network decentralizes, which is part of why the interpretation described below spends so much space on how that transition is supposed to work.
Who Actually Regulates Crypto Right Now, Without This Law
The CLARITY Act would make a jurisdictional split permanent by statute. Something close to that split already exists informally, through a joint interpretation the SEC and CFTC issued on March 17, 2026 — a 68-page release building on a Memorandum of Understanding the two agencies signed six days earlier.
That interpretation sorts crypto assets into five categories: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins, and digital securities. Only the last category is treated as inherently a security; the other four are explicitly carved out. The SEC named ether specifically as an example of a digital commodity that isn't a security under this framework. The CFTC, for its part, confirmed it will apply the Commodity Exchange Act consistent with the SEC's categories, extending its anti-fraud authority to the non-security categories.
The catch is durability. An interpretive release isn't a formal rule and isn't a statute — it reflects how the current SEC and CFTC leadership (Chairman Paul Atkins and Chairman Michael Selig, respectively) choose to read existing law, and a future set of commissioners could narrow, reinterpret, or withdraw it without needing Congress at all. That's the practical difference the CLARITY Act is meant to settle: guidance can change with the next election cycle, a statute can't.
How the Bill Got Here
Representative French Hill, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced the CLARITY Act in May 2025. The House passed it two months later, in July 2025, by a bipartisan 294-134 margin.
The Senate took a different path, working through two separate committees rather than one. The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its own companion bill, the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act, in January 2026. The Senate Banking Committee advanced its version of the House bill by a 15-9 committee vote in May 2026 — a committee-level result that didn't guarantee floor support, since two of the Democratic votes came with explicit reservations about issues still unresolved. In late July 2026, Senator Lummis released combined text merging the Banking and Agriculture committees' bills into one package, adding roughly 70 pages in the process and setting up the vote that's now pending.
What's Actually Holding Up the Vote
Clearing the Senate requires 60 votes to end debate under the chamber's cloture rules — first on the motion to simply start considering the bill, and again on the bill itself after amendments. Republicans hold 53 seats, meaning at least seven Democratic votes are needed at each stage.
As of early August, Democratic Senate Banking Committee staff identified five specific unresolved areas: securities-law protections, illicit-finance safeguards, national-security provisions, enforcement authority split between the agencies, and an ethics provision addressing senior federal officials' personal financial ties to the crypto industry. Senator Thom Tillis, involved directly in the negotiations, acknowledged the two sides were "not quite there" on an ethics agreement. That last item has drawn the most public friction — a handful of Senate Democrats formally opposed an earlier merged draft specifically because it dropped stronger ethics language they'd requested during the months of negotiation. Supporters of the bill have added over a dozen anti-illicit-finance provisions in response to earlier criticism, aimed at broadening the coalition needed to reach 60.
What Changes If It Passes — and If It Doesn't
Passage converts the current interpretive framework into something a future SEC or CFTC can't simply reinterpret away. For projects and exchanges already operating under the March 2026 guidance, that mostly means legal certainty gets a permanent floor rather than a change in day-to-day obligations.
Missing the pre-recess window doesn't create an immediate compliance gap. No currently operating exchange, token, or stablecoin faces new legal exposure the day after a missed vote — the interpretive guidance keeps functioning exactly as it does now. What changes is the calendar: multiple analysts tracking the bill say a missed window this year pushes realistic passage into the next Congress, with enactment unlikely before mid-2027 given how legislative floor time compresses around midterm election politics.
FAQ
Does the CFTC or SEC regulate crypto in the US? Both, under different parts of the market. As of a March 2026 joint interpretation, the SEC oversees crypto assets that qualify as securities — mainly token sales and fundraising — while the CFTC's anti-fraud authority extends to "digital commodities," the category most established, decentralized tokens now fall into. The CLARITY Act would make this same split permanent by law rather than by agency guidance.
Has the CLARITY Act passed? It passed the House in July 2025 by a 294-134 vote. As of August 6, 2026, the Senate has not held a floor vote, though the bill is formally eligible for one and Senate leadership has said a vote will happen before the August recess.
What is a "digital commodity" under the CLARITY Act? A crypto asset whose value comes from a functioning, sufficiently decentralized network rather than from the ongoing efforts of a centralized promoter or team. Digital commodities would fall under CFTC oversight rather than SEC securities regulation.
Is ether a security? No, according to the SEC's own March 2026 interpretation, which explicitly classified ether as a digital commodity rather than a security. That classification is guidance, not statute, so it could be revisited by a future SEC.
Why is the Senate vote taking so long? The bill needs 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles, and Republicans hold 53 seats. Reaching 60 requires at least seven Democratic votes, and negotiators have not yet resolved several issues, most prominently an ethics provision covering senior officials' personal financial ties to the crypto industry.
What happens to crypto regulation if the CLARITY Act fails to pass in 2026? Nothing changes immediately — the SEC and CFTC's March 2026 interpretive framework continues to apply. What changes is durability and timeline: without a statute, the framework can be altered by a future administration without a congressional vote, and most trackers expect a missed 2026 window to push comprehensive legislation into 2027 at the earliest.
