Senate Republicans revise Clarity Act ahead of cloture vote
DeFi & Yields ·
New text narrows crypto crime-law protections and adds bank-deposit safeguards as GOP calls it a final offer to Democrats.
Senate Republicans have circulated a reworked version of the Clarity Act, according to details posted on X, incorporating a revised ethics framework that President Trump has signed off on. Lawmakers are describing the package as their last, best and final proposal to Democrats before Tuesday's scheduled cloture vote, according to The Block.
One of the most consequential changes involves the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act section, which has been scaled back to cover only civil enforcement matters tied to the Bank Secrecy Act. Language that would have shielded certain conduct from criminal prosecution, including cases brought under Section 1960, was stripped from the draft.
On ethics, a Republican aide characterized the agreement as covering roughly 80% of the Tillis-Gallego proposal. Under the revised terms, the president would need to either divest substantial crypto-related holdings or place them in a blind trust. The text also grants state attorneys general authority to enforce these ethics rules, a concession the White House had previously resisted.
The stablecoin section now includes circuit-breaker language, an idea Senator Tillis floated in July, giving federal regulators power to step in if evidence emerges of large-scale deposit outflows from community banks into stablecoins. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would serve as the regulator responsible for making that determination.
The agriculture title was also tightened, adding stricter limits on vertical integration and addressing conflicts of interest for digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers, particularly around affiliate trading. The revised text further specifies that state consumer protection statutes remain in force and that protections for developers do not exempt them from derivatives law or extend to prediction markets, a point noted in coverage from wublockchain.xyz.
Whether Democrats will accept the narrowed terms, especially the removal of criminal-case protections under BRCA, remains unclear ahead of Tuesday's vote. It is also not yet known how the circuit-breaker mechanism would be triggered in practice or how state attorneys general enforcement powers under the ethics provisions would interact with existing federal oversight.