The US Senate finally has a final text for its crypto market structure bill — and getting there cost Donald Trump a personal concession. On September 14, Republican Sens. Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman and Tim Scott unveiled the final draft of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, folding in 126 changes Democrats had asked for. A cloture vote is set for Tuesday, September 15, and it needs 60 votes — Republicans hold only 53 seats.
The bigger surprise is what the president gave up. A senior GOP aide says Trump agreed to roughly 80% of the ethics proposal pushed by Sens. Tillis and Gallego. Under the new text, the president, vice president, members of Congress, federal judges and their spouses must either divest "substantial" crypto holdings before the law takes effect or park them in a qualified blind trust. Officials get three days to notify their ethics office, which then has three more days to disclose the move publicly. Children of officials aren't covered — a gap critics have already flagged.
A genuine new piece is enforcement: state attorneys general can now sue over ethics violations, something no earlier draft allowed. Lummis called it "some of the toughest ethics restrictions in U.S. history," which Trump accepted voluntarily. The context matters here — by his own disclosures, the president's crypto income topped $1.4 billion in 2025.
Democrats also won ground on stablecoins: the Treasury now gets an 18-month window to restrict stablecoin rewards if community banks start bleeding deposits, a provision banking lobbyists pushed hard for all summer. On Polymarket, odds of passage jumped from 22% to 32% right after the text dropped — traders read the concessions as substantive, not cosmetic.
Whether the bill actually clears the Senate Tuesday is still an open question: 60 votes with a 53-seat majority means at least seven Democrats have to cross over. But the administration agreeing to public oversight of the president's own holdings is already unusual on its own.
