Washington, May 14, 2026. On the illuminated board at the Senate Banking Committee’s chamber the roll-call numbers appear: 15 yes, 9 no. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act clears the first of the two decisive steps in the United States Senate. Two Democrats, Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, broke ranks and joined the Republicans. Elizabeth Warren, the committee’s ranking Democrat, contested the way the vote on amendments was handled.

The text now has to go to a vote on the Senate floor, where it will be merged with the Senate Agriculture Committee’s version into a single bill. According to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the vote should come by August. At that point, if the floor approves, the text will have to go back to the House for the final agreed version, before landing on Donald Trump’s desk for signature. The House, for its part, had already approved its own version last July 2025.

Along the way, open obstacles remain: the ethics provision to limit conflicts of interest of government officials (read: the Trump family and the business with World Liberty Financial), the strengthening of anti-money-laundering powers over DeFi, the question of yields on stablecoins.

What came out of the committee, though, is already a substantially formed document. It’s worth analyzing.

The problem the Clarity Act tries to solve is an old one.

In the United States, for years, two federal agencies have been fighting over jurisdiction on digital assets: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), responsible for financial securities, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), responsible for commodities. The SEC, under Gary Gensler, had pushed to frame nearly all digital assets as securities, subjecting them to its own registration and disclosure regime. The CFTC, for its part, had always considered Bitcoin a commodity, ever since 2015. Between the two positions, an army of exchanges, brokers and custodians operating in a regulatory limbo.

The Clarity Act draws a clear line. It creates two main categories: digital commodity, under the CFTC, and digital asset security, under the SEC. The assignment criterion is the “maturity of the underlying blockchain”. If the network is considered “mature”, meaning sufficiently decentralized, with no team or company controlling its development and governance, the token ends up under the CFTC as a commodity. If instead the network is still dominated by an identifiable issuer, the asset stays a security under the SEC until it passes the maturity test.

The Clarity Act establishes that assets whose spot Exchange Traded Products were admitted to listing on an exchange before January 1, 2026 are automatically classified as non-securities. In legislative jargon it’s called a grandfather clause: a retroactive safe-conduct that freezes a classification and makes it permanent.

Bitcoin falls fully within the clause. Spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved by the SEC in January 2024 and have been listed ever since. Bitcoin’s non-security classification, once the Clarity Act takes effect, will be permanent and not reversible by subsequent SEC regulatory acts. Even a future president with a hostile SEC could no longer call Bitcoin’s status into question.

This means that, if the law is approved as it is formulated today, Bitcoin will be forever considered a commodity by US regulators.

For stablecoins, the Clarity Act doesn’t add much new: it defers entirely to the GENIUS Act, already become law in 2025, which established the licensing regime for issuers of “permitted payment stablecoins”. Under the GENIUS Act the issuer cannot pay interest to whoever holds a stablecoin. The logic behind the ban is that, if it could, stablecoins would turn into bank deposits without banking regulation, draining capital from traditional banks.

The Clarity Act confirms the ban on the issuer, but adds a compromise at the level of the intermediaries. Digital asset companies, primarily exchanges and custodians, can offer their users “rewards” on stablecoins, provided they are tied to activity and transactions and not to mere holding. On paper, a reasonable distinction. In practice, everything depends on how those rewards are structured.

Six of the main American banking associations pointed out to the Senate that, the way the bill is written now, it’s possible to build programs that effectively reward the user’s balance but are formally triggered by a minimum number of transactions: a yield on balance disguised as an activity incentive. For the banks, then, it’s a regulatory loophole that would reproduce the effect of interest on deposits without applying the rules on deposits. They’re probably not wrong.

What will really change once the Clarity Act becomes law? For institutions, a lot. For the individual bitcoiner, almost nothing.

Today a regulated bank in the United States operates on fragile ground when it offers its clients digital asset services. The rescission of SAB 121 unlocked roughly $115 billion in assets under management in custody, but it remains administrative guidance, not a law. A new administration could overturn it tomorrow morning. The Clarity Act explicitly amends federal banking legislation to allow regulated banks to use digital assets for the activities they already carry out: payments, lending, custody, trading.

For the exchanges and brokers operating on digital assets, the Clarity Act creates three new types of entities that can register with the CFTC: digital commodity exchange, digital commodity dealer, digital commodity broker. Until now these entities often operated with state licenses (the well-known money transmitter licenses) or under unsuitable SEC registrations. Having a dedicated federal category means being able to operate without the constant risk of a retroactive enforcement action.

For pension funds, insurers, family offices, the compliance framework changes. Allocating money to an asset class whose classification is ambiguous is complicated from a fiduciary standpoint. With the Clarity Act, the asset class has a name, a regulator, a perimeter. Goldman Sachs and others have said clearly that the next wave of institutional adoption is waiting for exactly this.

Let’s come to Bitcoin as an asset, not as a technology. The difference matters because many, reading the Clarity Act, hastily deduce a “final legitimization” of Bitcoin. That would be an exaggeration. The technology has never needed the legitimization of a Senate committee, thank goodness. The bitcoiner who holds their own keys has never asked anyone’s permission and won’t start now.

What the Clarity Act produces is an institutional legitimization. It’s a door that opens in the traditional financial system to allow the entry of capital that, until today, was held back by fiduciary and compliance constraints. It’s the difference between “you can have bitcoin in your wallet” (true forever) and “you can have bitcoin on the balance sheet of the pension fund that manages the savings of a million Americans” (true only if the regulator provides a legal framework to do it without incurring sanctions).

The numbers give some idea. Industry surveys indicate that 76% of global investors plan to increase their exposure to digital assets, and nearly 60% expect to allocate more than 5% of their assets under management. Datos Insights estimates at roughly $3 trillion the capital of US financial services that is today unable to enter Bitcoin for regulatory reasons. A fraction of that figure, once unlocked, is enough to move the market.

In other words. Wall Street’s drawing rooms welcome a new tenant called Bitcoin. The basement, where private keys are kept, will stay exactly as it is.