Senate Republicans Update CLARITY Act Before September 15 Vote

Senate Republicans have released updated CLARITY Act text ahead of the September 15 procedural vote, adding new rules for non-decentralized DeFi protocols and clarifying how credit unions can deal in crypto.

The changes reflect weeks of negotiation over the August recess, but they leave untouched the ethics provisions that have stalled Democratic support for the bill.

New DeFi and Credit Union Language

The updated bill requires non-decentralized DeFi protocols, platforms that market themselves as decentralized without actually functioning that way, to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

That requirement mirrors Section 10301 of the Banking Committee’s portion of the bill, although crypto developer Roman Storm questioned the phrasing on X, asking how something billed as DeFi could be “non-decentralized.”

The new text also limits the DeFi provisions to spot or cash digital commodity transactions, a change aimed at addressing concerns some Native American tribes had raised about blockchain-based prediction markets. Credit unions, meanwhile, gained clearer authority to deal in crypto under the revised language.

Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who has championed the bill, described the revisions as the product of bipartisan negotiations and wrote that the updated text contains more than 100 changes requested by Democrats.

In another post, she put the figure at more than 115 Democratic “wins,” including a felony bar on fraudsters, $150 million for the CFTC and crackdowns on platforms such as Binance.

“Now they need to vote for the bill they built,” she wrote. “Anything less is walking away from their own work.”

Those changes come just days before the Senate is scheduled to vote on whether to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed. The September 15 vote requires 60 senators, leaving Republicans dependent on Democratic support.

Ethics Talks Remain the Bottleneck

The latest changes do not alter the ethics section or the bill’s stablecoin yield provisions, and that matters because ethics has been one of the biggest obstacles to Democratic support.

Yesterday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong backed a “yes” vote and pointed out that lawmakers had resolved the issues his company previously considered must-have changes. He also described the ethics negotiations as one of the last matters to settle.

Democrats, however, have pushed for provisions requiring elected officials to divest relevant crypto interests or place them in blind trusts. The issue became more urgent after some legislators from that party called for scrutiny into President Donald Trump’s crypto dealings, from which he earned $1.2 billion, including from his Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin.

However, Lummis has argued that failure to pass the bill would not be because of ethics, but because Democrats refused to accept a bipartisan compromise. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a September 9 post on X, also urged senators to keep negotiating and advance the legislation.

As things stand, the revised text settles some disputes while leaving the most politically sensitive part of the negotiations unchanged, and the upcoming vote will show whether those compromises are enough to get the bill moving.