In Clarity Act’s final weeks, its path through U.S. Senate not getting much clearer

Were the restrictions to affect Trump, it’s also unclear how easily the president could extract himself from a complex web of crypto involvement, including digital-asset elements of his stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto ties of other businesses such as Truth Social and his namesake memecoin.

Even if the ethics provision is worked out, there are three other distinct negotiations still weighing on the Clarity Act process: settling remaining concerns of Democrats from the Senate Agriculture Committee that oversees commodities; resolving the worries of the law enforcement community over the legal shield for decentralized finance (DeFi) developers; and the still-lingering dispute over stablecoin yield that U.S. bankers continue to press.

“The reason I’m optimistic is because every single senator and stakeholder that cares about this, including industry groups like the Digital Chamber, remain committed and remain at the table,” said Cody Carbone, the CEO of the Digital Chamber, in a CoinDesk interview. “No one has given up.”

Carbone’s group is hosting a Tuesday fly-in event in which about 50 of its members from crypto firms including Hyperliquid, Elliptic and Anchorage Digital will head to as many as 30 lawmakers’ offices to make the case for the Clarity Act. They’re especially targeting senators who are outside of the negotiations, in the hopes of getting more of a rise of interest and support for a floor vote.

Crypto lobbyists had ridden some momentum when the Clarity Act managed to finally clear the Senate Banking Committee several weeks ago, but they’re now eager to get another negotiation breakthrough to give the process a boost. The goal for many is that the bill hits the Senate floor the week of July 13 (leaving about 13 working days, plus weekends, to finish negotiations and revise the bill into its final form.)

One crypto insider suggested that the Agriculture committee Democrats could possibly be satisfied if the bill ensured the entire five-member Commodity Futures Trading Commission would be filled, including its two vacant Democratic positions. But the law-enforcement discussion over DeFi may be stickier, because Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, the Nevada Democrat doing much of the negotiating over the DeFi section known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), has been said to steadily push back and demand more changes to developer liability protections, according to another person familiar with the talks.

For her part, one of the leading Republican negotiators, Senator Cynthia Lummis, has been maintaining a steady stream of pro-Clarity posts on social media site X, urging her colleagues to hurry up. “Software developers should not need an army of lawyers to know if their code is legal,” she said in one over the weekend. “The Clarity Act ends that absurdity.”

A recent White House meeting was spurred by law enforcement groups expressing worries about contending with the DeFi space. But it ended with mixed results after Republicans tried to make the case that the latest Clarity Act draft includes a number of beefed-up tools for government investigators.

“We’re still in the thick of negotiations,” Carbone said. “There are several issues that need to be resolved before this bill can go to the Senate floor. Ethics and law enforcement concerns over the BRCA are the top two issues.”

Also, though the banking industry didn’t manage to derail the idea of stablecoin rewards in its earlier lobbying effort, it’s still trying to get more protections than it won in the most recent compromise measure. Bankers continue to argue that the Clarity Act doesn’t protect their core deposit-taking business sufficiently from the competition of stablecoin rewards programs, which they say can still look enough like deposit interest that the rewards could woo customers away.

“The banks will not accept it that way,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon has said, pledging a fight down to the wire.

That represents a lot of unfinished business for a busy Senate that’s trying to clear its plate before its summer exit.

The Senate’s rapidly dwindling floor calendar has about five weeks left before the lawmakers scatter for their summer recess, which will — for many — be focused on this year’s congressional midterm elections. Though they return again for a few weeks in September, political observers cast strong doubts on the lawmakers being willing to produce a bipartisan effort in the weeks before the November general election.

While the calendar has been an adversary, considering the industry’s need for as much as a week of floor time, the Senate already cleared one of the Clarity Act’s major bandwidth competitors: the bipartisan housing bill aimed at making U.S. homes more widely available. That leaves one major must-pass bill in the national-security realm, which has been giving senators fits as they battle over contentious appointments in the Trump administration (namely Trump’s favored loyalist, his Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte, as the stand-in director of national intelligence).

The National Defense Authorization Act could also come up soon, and the Senate Agriculture Committee — still a major player in moving the Clarity Act toward the floor — is wrestling with its bigger priority: the farm bill.

And some in the gaming industry have pushed the idea of adding prediction-market language to the crypto bill, potentially trying to inject a very complicated topic into the process at the 11th hour.

“We keep hearing that there are other competing priorities in the Senate, and while that may be true, everyone is still prioritizing this, and that’s why you see readouts daily of different Senate groups meeting together, Republicans and Democrats sitting over lunch talking about passing clarity,” Carbone said.

The period of the congressional session after the November elections, a handful of weeks known as the lame-duck session, has been held out by some lawmakers and crypto leaders as a backup option to get Clarity passed this year. However, that period can be highly unpredictable and crowded with congressional action, depending on what’s left on the agenda.

Despite its remaining hurdles, some are still expressing strong assurances that 2026 is the year for the crypto market structure law.

“Clarity is no longer a question of if, but when Congress gets it across the finish line,” said Summer Mersinger, the CEO of the Blockchain Association, in a statement to CoinDesk. “Lawmakers are tackling the outstanding issues with real bipartisan resolve, and they are ready to turn years of debate into durable law that protects consumers, gives builders certainty and keeps American leading.”

But analysts are more reserved in their expectations.

“We believe that at least the Senate needs to pass the bill before its August recess for it to become law this year,” Beacon Policy Advisors, a policy research group in Washington, said in a Monday note. “While hypothetically negotiations could continue into the fall, incentives change around the midterms, and the odds that the bill will become law at all, not just this year, will diminish significantly if the Senate misses its August deadline.”