A 630-page bill — and not a single Democrat's name on it. That's the state of play after Senate Republicans released a revised version of the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to set the rules for America's crypto market, on September 10 and scheduled the first procedural vote for September 15.
Senator Cynthia Lummis has been leading the rewrite for more than a year now: an earlier attempt stalled in July, another in August, and Capitol Hill finally has a date on the calendar — 2:15 p.m. on September 15, a cloture vote.
What the rewrite actually changes
The most notable change targets DeFi. Earlier drafts largely left alone protocols that call themselves decentralized but are, in practice, run by an identifiable team. Now, if a person or group can "control or materially alter" how a protocol functions, that platform will have to register with the CFTC, under rules the commission and the Treasury still need to write. Genuinely decentralized exchanges with no such controlling party fall outside the requirement.
A separate fix came after pressure from tribal governments worried the bill would accidentally sweep up prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. DeFi provisions now apply only to "spot and cash digital commodity transactions" — prediction markets don't fall into that bucket. The text also spells out how credit unions are allowed to handle crypto.
The math still doesn't work
Republicans hold 53 Senate seats; cloture needs 60. Even a unified GOP conference isn't guaranteed — Rand Paul and Josh Hawley have already signaled they might vote no, and Thom Tillis could join them — which means leadership needs seven to ten Democrats. Only two crossed over in committee. Lummis says she folded in 114 separate requests from Democratic colleagues and calls the result "a strong bipartisan product," but Politico reports no Democrat has actually signed on to the new text.
The core sticking point hasn't moved: an ethics provision that lets the Justice Department pursue officials over crypto conflicts of interest is set to expire in January 2029. Democrats want it tightened and made permanent, and they're also pushing for clarity on what happens to Trump's own crypto holdings — his stake in World Liberty Financial and the TRUMP memecoin, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. None of that got resolved in this draft.
The stakes are plain enough without embellishment: Lummis warned on X back on September 6 that if the bill fails in this Congress, the next realistic shot at crypto market-structure legislation won't come until 2030. An industry that has spent years asking Washington to settle who regulates tokens — the SEC or the CFTC — now has less than a week to find out if it's finally getting an answer.
