CLARITY Act (Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025)

Where the bill actually stands

Rep. French Hill of Arkansas introduced H.R. 3633 on 29 May 2025. The House Committees on Financial Services and Agriculture each reported it with an amendment on 23 June 2025, filed together as House Report 119-168 in two parts.² The House debated and passed it on 17 July 2025. The Congressional Record for that day carries the tally: yeas 294, nays 134, not voting 4, on Roll No. 199.³

The Senate received the message from the House on 18 September 2025 and referred the bill to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs the same day. On 1 June 2026 the committee reported it with an amendment and no written report.²

That is the record, and this page stops there. Through 1 June 2026 the bill had not passed the Senate floor, had not gone to conference, and had not been presented to the President. We have not confirmed any Senate action after that date from a primary source, so we do not describe one.

What the bill would actually do

The Congressional Research Service summarises the structure plainly. The bill would give the CFTC a central role in regulating digital commodities and related intermediaries, while preserving certain aspects of SEC authority over primary market crypto transactions, subject to a new limited exemption from SEC registration requirements for fundraising.¹

A digital commodity, under the bill, is a digital asset whose value is intrinsically linked to the use of the blockchain.¹ That definition is doing a lot of work. It is the gate that decides which agency writes the rules a token trades under, and it is written around the relationship between the asset and the network rather than around the asset in isolation.

For a token issuer the operative provision is the exemption. An issuer relying on it would have to limit sales of digital commodities to $75 million over a twelve month period and file an offering statement.¹ Compare that to a Regulation D round, which has no dollar cap and no offering statement, and the tradeoff becomes visible. The bill offers a path to public distribution that Reg D does not, at the cost of a ceiling and a filing.

The mature blockchain test is the whole fight

H.R. 3633 would define a mature blockchain as a blockchain system, together with its related digital commodity, that is not controlled by any person or group of persons under common control.¹ To qualify for trading on an exchange, a digital commodity would need to sit on a blockchain that is mature or has achieved decentralized control as the bill defines it, or its issuer would need to file certain reports instead.

That test is a statutory version of an argument that has been running informally on the SEC side for years, about whether reliance on a promoter's efforts can end. The history of that argument, and how far it has and has not been codified, sits on the security versus commodity classification page. What is new here is the attempt to write a control threshold into statute rather than to leave it to case by case analysis under Howey.

The firm's interpretation is that the mature blockchain concept is more useful as a design checklist than as a legal target. Removing unilateral upgrade authority, ending team control of the treasury, and being able to name the specific event that ended each one are things worth doing whether or not this bill passes, because the same facts matter in a Howey analysis today.

The Senate text is not the House text

The version reported out of Senate Banking is a different document from the one that passed the House. Its title was expanded to add Federal Reserve provisions: amending the Federal Reserve Act to prohibit Federal reserve banks from offering certain products or services directly to an individual, and to prohibit the use of a central bank digital currency for monetary policy.⁴

Read that as a practical warning about sourcing. Summaries written between July 2025 and mid 2026 describe the House text, and a founder quoting one of them is quoting a version that is no longer the live one. If any part of a plan turns on a specific provision, read the Senate reported bill, not a summary of the House bill.

Planning around a bill that is not law

We have watched this movie once already. FIT21, the closest predecessor concept, passed the House in May 2024 and expired unenacted at the end of the 118th Congress. Teams we worked with that built structures around it spent the following year unwinding assumptions. The firm's interpretation is that pending legislation is a planning input, not a design constraint.

The practical version of that: design against the law that exists, which means the Howey analysis and the Commodity Exchange Act definition, and treat a favorable statute as upside rather than as the plan. If a token structure only works if a bill passes, it is not a structure, it is a wager on a Senate calendar nobody controls.

One distinction is worth keeping straight, because it gets blended constantly. Interpretive guidance can be revised by a future Commission without a vote in Congress. A statute cannot. That is the real argument for wanting this bill, and it is not the same as wanting its specific provisions.

What we settle now, whatever Congress does

Four things a founder controls regardless of the bill's fate. Whether the token carries any claim on protocol revenue. Whether the team holds unilateral upgrade or treasury authority, and what event would end it. Which distribution channels exist and who the counterparty is in each. And what public communications say the buyer is buying. All four show up in a Howey analysis today, and in a mature blockchain analysis if this ever becomes law.

Whether a specific token, structure or offering would qualify under this bill, or under existing law, is fact specific and jurisdiction specific, and that call belongs to your counsel. This page describes pending legislation as of the review date above. It is not legal advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.