Last week, the Senate Banking Committee approved the Clarity Act, setting the table for a full Senate vote at some point in the future. No date has been set. After the GENIUS Act became law last July 2025, fintech players have been waiting for clarity on Clarity.

"The Clarity Act clearing Senate Banking on a bipartisan vote is the clearest signal yet that U.S. policymakers are converging on a workable framework for onchain markets," said Nate Holiday, co-founder at Space and Time, a decentralized Web3 data warehouse based in California. "The next phase is about turning that framework into infrastructure that institutions and protocol developers can easily adopt. We're glad to see the bill moving and focused on the work ahead."

The landmark U.S. cryptocurrency legislation establishes a comprehensive regulatory framework to define jurisdiction over digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission 

The bill still needs to clear the full Senate, reconcile three versions – Senate Banking, Senate Agriculture, and the House of Representatives version, before heading to the White House. Holiday calls it a "thornier path" than what the GENIUS Act had to go through. 

Polymarket traders assign a 65% probability to Clarity being signed into law at some point this year. 

Politically, pros and cons are split three ways. Sponsors of the bill described it as overdue "rules of the road." 

"This legislation brings digital assets into the sunlight with clear rules, stronger safeguards, and better tools to stop bad actors," said Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC), adding that the bill, if passed, helps assure fintech advances in the U.S.

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee's Digital Assets subcommittee the and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) cast their yes votes as conditional and explicitly tied further support to ethics and law-enforcement changes.

For Wall Street, Fidelity has been the most overt cheerleader and has advocated for the legislation. The Clarity Act would give Fidelity cleaner guidelines to engage in digital asset custody, trading, and ETF allocation.  

The crypto crowd is supportive. 

Legal ambiguity in the U.S. has held back DeFi builders for years, said Zachary Pelkey, vice president of engineering at CoinFello. "The Clarity Act draws a line and says that DeFi developers building open-source software, self-custody tooling, or node infrastructure shouldn't be treated like money transmitters when they don't control user funds."

David Sacks, former Trump administration crypto czar and a well known tech investor in Silicon Valley, called it "a monumental step in making the U.S. the crypto capital of the world."

"Ripple stands behind this bill because (cryptocurrency investors) deserve the same rules and protections as every other asset class," Ripple (CRYPTO: XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse said on his X account.

Not Over Yet: What's Missing From Clarity?

Recent renditions of the Clarity Act in the Banking Committee have drawn some criticism from Web3 founders, but much of it is more about DeFi structure, data‑access scope, and stablecoin economics. 

Some concerns are that regulators will interpret "know your protocol" or "economic actor" obligations in ways that make non‑KYC DeFi frontends operationally risky, even if wallets remain technically self‑custodial. 

"I think codifying the right to self-custody is the most structurally important provision in this bill," said Shady El Damaty, co-founder of the zero-knowledge cryptography Digital ID protocol known as Human.tech.

Section 605 of the Act in the Senate Banking version, titled "Keep Your Coins," establishes that federal agencies cannot restrict individuals from using self-hosted wallets for lawful purposes. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called that a "crypto-industry giveaway" that could weaken investor protection and anti-money laundering safeguards, suggesting revisions of the final bill could strengthen Section 605 rather than remove it.

"Section 605 is not a concession to the crypto industry; it's a recognition that the ability to hold your own keys is a baseline property right in a digital economy, not a privilege granted by intermediaries," said El Damaty.  Human.tech designs solutions that give its wallet users the ability to prove they're not on a sanctions list, prove their residency and that they are not a bot all without exposing the underlying data. "That’s the infrastructure layer the Clarity Act doesn’t yet contemplate but will eventually require," he predicted.

The House version's similar provision can be seen here under Section 105.

The main pro-privacy and pro-self-custody push – a perennial fight for crypto natives – has been to keep and harden the protections already in the bill, especially the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) in Section 604 and the self-hosted-wallet data-collection limit in Section 307. They want to make sure new revisions do not include amendments that would narrow those provisions, blur the custody and control line, or make neutral software publishers easier to treat as regulated intermediaries, based on Coin Center's information. 

The most realistic amendment path is a hybrid compromise in the final version: retain BRCA and Keep Your Coins, add or preserve explicit bad-actor language, and repair specific areas where developer protections were weakened by markup edits. A much broader statutory ban on wallet-counterparty data collection or an expansive redefinition of "covered user" looks politically harder, Coin Center said on May 14.

When Trump Signs Clarity Act Into Law, Does Bitcoin Hit 100K Again?

Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) prices have been roughly flat to slightly down in the days immediately following the Senate Banking Committee vote on May 14, after trading around the $79,000 to $80,000 range. It closed higher on May 14 at $81,060 but has retreated since, failing to $76,600 as of this writing.

What's setting the cryptocurrency pricing today is rising rates in the West, notes Dessislava Ianeva, an analyst at Nexo, a digital assets wealth platform.  The two-year Treasury yield is at 4.11%, the highest level since June 2025, when BTC was trading at $104,000. 

"Until rates pressures ease, the legislative path is a slow-burn driver," Ianeva said. "Looking at GENIUS’s broader trajectory, the next inflection is the Senate floor vote."

The GENIUS Act template is instructive on what to expect. Last March, the Senate committee's approval produced a 7.5% rally over two weeks before Bitcoin gave back every dollar by early April. The durable rally built in the run-up to the floor votes that followed, not at committee approval itself, and the all-time high of $124,715 came 207 days later, on October 6. 

For some, Clarity Act's becoming a law will chip away at blockchain projects with no use case, no future. That might eventually eliminate dozens of tokens from the mix once Clarity joins Genius and becomes law.

The main tension points for Bitcoin are the conditional Democratic yes votes on Clarity, the banks-versus-crypto fight over stablecoin yield (aka "rewards"), and notion that the market's initial euphoria over Clarity faded fast.  The legislative breakthrough was real, and Web3 founders are more pleased than not.  But for retail investors, everyone seems to be closing in on what they have been asking for. Bitcoin holders will have to wait longer to see what is in it for them.

The writer owns Bitcoin.  Artwork created by the author using Canva.

Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.