Crypto's most important piece of legislation is back on the table - and the people pushing it say time is almost up.
The CLARITY Act is returning to the Senate this week after three months of being stuck, with Senator Bill Hagerty saying Monday that there is now enough support to move the bill to the Banking Committee for markup in the second half of April.
The CLARITY Act would give digital assets their first clear regulatory framework in the United States, defining which tokens are securities, which are commodities, and how stablecoin issuers must operate. It would split oversight between the SEC and CFTC based on the type of asset, ending years of regulatory uncertainty that has pushed some crypto companies to move their operations overseas.
For investors, regulatory clarity is the missing piece that institutional money managers have been waiting for. Large asset managers and pension funds have mostly stayed on the sidelines of crypto because they cannot invest in assets that do not have a clear regulatory classification.
The SEC has sued dozens of crypto companies under existing securities law, but courts have issued conflicting rulings on whether most tokens are actually securities - creating a legal mess that the CLARITY Act is designed to clean up.
The bill stalled in January over a fight about stablecoin yields - whether holders should earn interest on their balances the way bank depositors earn interest on savings. A deal brokered by Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks on March 20 fixed it by banning passive yield while allowing activity-based rewards tied to payments and platform use.
That framework ended the standoff between pro-crypto senators and banking committee members who worried about stablecoins competing directly with bank deposits for consumer dollars.
Senator Cynthia Lummis posted a warning on Friday: pass the CLARITY Act now or wait until 2030. Her point - if the bill does not clear the Senate before the 2026 midterms, the next Congress would have to start over from scratch with a new bill, new negotiations, and new committee assignments.
To hit that window, the Banking Committee needs to finish its markup by the end of April and get the bill to the floor before the August recess. The House passed its own version of the bill in late 2025, so if the Senate version passes, the two chambers would need to reconcile the differences in conference before sending a final version to the president.
The markup hearing is the key event this week for crypto investors. If the bill moves through committee, it sets up the first real regulatory framework for digital assets in U.S. history and could unlock a wave of institutional money that has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for rules.
If it stalls again, the uncertainty that has hung over the industry since 2021 drags on for years - and the companies that left the U.S. for friendlier jurisdictions are unlikely to come back.
Bitcoin and Ethereum both traded higher Monday morning after the markup news broke, suggesting the market is pricing in at least some chance of passage.