The US Senate Banking Committee began its markup of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Wednesday, with more than 100 amendments filed before the gavel. Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is pushing for committee approval this week, with cosponsors Cynthia Lummis and Thom Tillis pressing to advance the 309-page bill largely intact. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed filed the largest blocs of amendments, including a Warren-led package of more than 40 items aimed at tightening consumer protections.

The CLARITY Act is the Senate's response to a House-passed market structure bill from July 2025 and represents the most substantive legislative effort to date to resolve years of US digital-asset jurisdictional ambiguity. Bill text was released just after midnight Tuesday, leaving Senators and the lobbying machinery less than 48 hours to react before today's session. The amendment flood reflects both real policy stakes and the fact that the committee math heavily favors the GOP-led version moving forward largely as drafted.

The bill draws a hard jurisdictional line between the SEC and CFTC. Digital asset securities sit with the SEC, digital commodities with the CFTC, and payment stablecoins with a combination of the Federal Reserve and state regulators. Section 409 carves out an explicit exclusion for DeFi developers, exempting protocol creators who do not custody user assets from broker-dealer registration. Reed wants to scrap that section entirely and to restrict stablecoin yield payments. Senator Bill Hagerty filed an amendment that would ban any future US central bank digital currency. Industry trade groups have publicly backed the chairman's text, with Aave CEO Stani Kulechov endorsing the markup ahead of the vote.

Bitcoin traded near $79,400 after the PPI-driven slide earlier in the session, with the broader crypto complex paring losses as the markup details circulated. Crypto-correlated equities including Circle and Coinbase opened weak but moved higher into the afternoon as the bill's stablecoin and developer-protection language became clearer. Yields and the dollar held their post-PPI levels, neither of which is closely tied to legislative outcomes.

A committee approval this week would clear the path to a full Senate floor vote, where reconciliation with the House version becomes the next bottleneck. The Warren and Reed amendments are unlikely to clear committee but flag the lines along which a future Democratic majority would attempt to amend the law. For traders, the cleanest immediate signal is on stablecoin issuers and US-listed centralized exchanges: a clean markup with intact stablecoin provisions removes one of the multi-year overhangs on the sector. A vote that gets pulled or watered down would land the other direction.

The crypto industry has been chasing this bill since 2022. The markup that started Wednesday is the closest the Senate has gotten to actually advancing it.