House Hearing Pushes the CLARITY Act Toward the Senate

The House Financial Services Committee spent Friday making its case for the CLARITY Act, the digital asset market structure bill that cleared the chamber in July 2025 and now waits on the Senate. The hearing ran in New York under a title that left no doubt about the goal: Building the Future of Finance: How the CLARITY Act Unlocks Innovation. One job. Keep the pressure on.

What the bill would settle

The fight is over jurisdiction. The SEC and the CFTC both claim pieces of the crypto market, and the line between them has never been clean. CLARITY draws it, handing each agency defined responsibilities and promising companies a predictable answer to the question of which regulator governs their token. Backers also frame the bill as a way to keep crypto firms building inside the US rather than decamping for friendlier jurisdictions, with stronger investor protections written in. Rep. Bryan Steil, who chaired the hearing, called it unfinished business. "This is our opportunity to seize the moment [...] this is our opportunity to finish the job and have CLARITY, which passed the House under the leadership of Chairman Hill a while ago, get all the way across the line," he said. He pointed to the GENIUS Act, passed in July 2025, as evidence the broader effort is already moving.

The industry pitch

Witnesses came with a market argument. Tokenized assets and stablecoins, they said, could widen access to liquidity by enabling round-the-clock trading, something the traditional markets that close each afternoon cannot match. Randi Abernethy, who runs clearing and group risk at the exchange Bullish, told the panel that clearer rules would pull capital back into the US from offshore jurisdictions. The witness table skewed legal and institutional, with chief legal officers from WisdomTree and Nova Labs and a policy director from Coin Center rounding out the roster.

The enforcement angle

Senator Cynthia Lummis framed the bill as more than deregulation. In an X post backing the legislation, she argued it hardens enforcement rather than loosening it. "The CLARITY Act writes real-time interdiction between exchanges and investigators into law, allows illicit funds to be frozen in hours instead of waiting years, and preserves every money-laundering charge investigators already rely on," she wrote. The House passed the bill with bipartisan support a year ago. What CLARITY still lacks is a matching vote in the Senate.