The House passed the CLARITY Act in July 2025; Senate consideration continued through 2026.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act passed the House of Representatives in July 2025 with bipartisan support. Senate consideration continued through 2026. For operators, the interesting question is not whether the bill becomes law in its current form. It is what the operating requirements look like under either outcome, because most of them are already discoverable from the text.
The bill divides oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with the CFTC taking spot market authority over digital commodities and the SEC retaining authority over investment contract offerings and related activity. The mechanism that decides which side an asset falls on is the concept of a mature blockchain system: a network sufficiently decentralized and functional that the associated asset is treated as a digital commodity rather than as a security.
The bill contemplates registration categories for digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers, with customer asset segregation, disclosure, record-keeping and supervisory obligations attached. Provisional registration pathways would allow existing firms to operate while the full regime is implemented.
Whichever regulator supervises a given activity, three operating expectations recur. Record-keeping: complete, tamper-evident records of orders, transfers, custody positions and system changes, retained for defined periods and producible on request. Custody standards: segregation of customer assets, key control with documented authority, and reconciliation between internal books and on-chain balances. Surveillance: monitoring for manipulative or abusive activity, and for the operational events that precede loss, with escalation to named people.
Build to the intersection rather than to a forecast. Evidence and monitoring designed to satisfy either regulator will satisfy both: timestamped incident timelines, change records tied to authorization, custody attestations, and surveillance output retained with the analyst decisions attached. Keep node and custody records examiner-ready, because those are the artifacts requested first in every regime already in force, from DORA to the GENIUS Act implementing rules.
The House-passed text remains the reference document. Senate committees have continued to work on market structure legislation, and no final statute has been enacted. Firms should read the bill as a statement of the direction of supervisory expectation rather than as a settled compliance deadline, and should avoid building processes that assume a specific enactment date.
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