Author: @milesjennings

Compiled by: Jia Huan, ChainCatcher

The Senate Banking Committee has just voted in a bipartisan manner to advance crypto "market structure" legislation (that is, legislation regarding market division of labor, regulatory responsibilities, and trading rules), marking a historic moment for the crypto industry.

Why is this significant? Because the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act will ultimately establish clear rules for blockchain networks and digital assets.

For the past decade, the lack of clear regulation in the United States has distorted the market, stifled innovation, and left consumers exposed to significant risks. CLARITY will end this situation.

The Securities Act of 1933 established investor protection mechanisms and supported the capital formation and innovation that followed in the United States over the next century. The significance of CLARITY is similar—this is a once-in-a-lifetime shift in the U.S. financial regulatory landscape that will bring huge opportunities.

With its passage in the Senate today, this fundamental legislation, crucial for the entire crypto industry, is closer to becoming law than ever before.

Whether they are startup founders, consumers, or large traditional financial institutions and investors migrating to the blockchain, all will benefit from this.

Next, the bills from the two congressional committees will be merged into a comprehensive bill for a vote by the full Senate. After passing, it will be sent to the House of Representatives for approval, and if successful, it will be sent to the White House for the President's signature.

Why America Needs CLARITY Now

For the past decade, the crypto industry has been expanding, yet the United States has never had a complete regulatory framework. Regulators have had to rely on piecing together existing laws to manage this industry, and this approach has been a complete failure.

This has not only caused chaos in legal interpretation and fluctuating standards but also led to significant government overreach and abuse of power.

This regulatory uncertainty has not only hindered innovation but has provided fertile ground for bad actors. In the past decade, highly publicized negative news in the crypto space has often featured ill-intentioned individuals easily launching products that exploit regulatory loopholes and take advantage of consumers.

Meanwhile, responsible builders have had to contend with the dubious practice of "law enforcement replacing legislation."

This uncertainty has pushed crypto development overseas. When the United States fails to make space for innovation, entrepreneurs will seek other jurisdictions, including those that have already implemented more refined regulatory systems.

The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and the UK's crypto regulations are two examples of American lagging behind.

Fortunately for American innovation, no other jurisdiction has yet gotten the regulatory framework right. But tailored regulations will ultimately attract and concentrate entrepreneurial activities in those areas, along with the economic value and job opportunities they create.

Imagine if Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, NVIDIA and Salesforce were all founded outside of the United States—what would the American economy look like?

Thus, if the United States can provide builders with regulatory clarity, domestic innovation will benefit greatly. The GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing American Stablecoin National Innovation Act), passed in July 2025, is a typical case.

GENIUS established a regulatory framework for stablecoins (digital assets typically pegged to fiat currency, usually the dollar), giving rise to a brand new model: open monetary infrastructure.

After this act was passed, it brought unprecedented growth and adoption, benefiting the American economy and the long-term dominance of the dollar.

When the legal framework is designed to both promote innovation and protect consumers, the United States can lead the way, and the world will benefit as a result.

Those entrepreneurs and early users who believe in the promise of crypto, regardless of outside perceptions, should have a clear regulatory framework to realize their vision.

They also need a framework that recognizes the potential of blockchain networks to drive a significant and novel transformation of the technology platform. This transformation must go beyond the speculative applications generated by poor policies, allowing people to build outside the initial financial scenarios (which are already covered by existing U.S. regulations).

CLARITY is specifically tailored to establish such a clear framework.

How We Got Here

The content of the CLARITY Act is not entirely new. Many of its concepts and principles stem from existing commodities and securities law. This act has also evolved from previous rounds of legislative iterations, including two "market structure" bills originating from the House of Representatives:

The "21st Century Financial Innovation and Technology Act," or "FIT21" (HR 4763), in 2024; and the "Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act" (HR 3633) in 2025.

Similar to the current Senate bill, both FIT21 and the House version of CLARITY sought to provide a path for blockchain networks to:

• Launch blockchain networks and digital assets safely and effectively in the U.S.;
• Clarify the regulatory division of labor between the SEC and CFTC in the crypto space, specifying whether digital assets are securities or commodities;
• Ensure oversight of crypto exchanges;
• Further protect American consumers by regulating rules around crypto transactions.

Two years ago, FIT21 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support (279 votes in favor against 136 opposed, including 71 Democratic supporters).

The House version of CLARITY passed in July 2025 with an even higher bipartisan support rate (294 votes in favor against 134 opposed, including 78 Democratic supporters).

Together, these bills sent a strong signal to the Senate: accelerate the legislation on crypto market structure.

The Senate version of CLARITY advanced further on the momentum of bipartisan cooperation in the House and made improvements on several key points compared to earlier bills (detailed below). This bill has progressed in the Senate for several years, with the past year being the fastest phase:

• June 2022: Senators Lummis and Gillibrand introduced the "Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act," the first bipartisan legislative proposal aimed at establishing a complete regulatory framework for the crypto industry.
• July 2025: The Senate Banking Committee (which oversees the SEC) released a bill discussion draft encompassing its jurisdiction, merging and aligning the ideas of the "Lummis-Gillibrand Bill" and the House version of CLARITY.
• Published a request for information, collecting feedback and legislative solutions, hoping to find a balance between innovation and maintaining financial stability and protecting consumers.
• September 2025: Following received feedback, the Senate Banking Committee released a second discussion draft.
• January 2026: The Senate Banking Committee released another iteration reflecting the results of several months of bipartisan negotiations.
• Also in January 2026: The Senate Agriculture Committee released and advanced market structure legislation within its jurisdiction.
• Today (May 14, 2026): The Senate Banking Committee has just advanced the portion of the CLARITY Act it is responsible for during the "markup" meeting.

Why CLARITY Matters: Networks Are Not Companies

For over a century, establishing companies has been the primary driver of innovation in the United States. This path is very mature: entrepreneurs raise funds to start businesses and generate profits that are returned to shareholders after success.

U.S. laws have finely tuned this model, specifying responsibilities and emphasizing transparency to align incentives and manage people's trust in founders and operators.

This framework works well for building companies. But it does not suit building networks.

The existing legal framework presupposes that there is a single manager in control, requiring that control to persist over time. But networks lack a central controller. Networks operate based on shared rules to coordinate people, capital, and resources, rather than through concentrated ownership.

Applying the corporate framework to networks distorts them into company forms. Control centralizes again, intermediaries reappear, and those reliant on the system are extracted of value.

Throughout the digital economy, this dynamic has given rise to a group of company-like networks with enormous centralized power—payment systems, e-commerce markets, social platforms, application stores—which have captured a disproportionate share of the value created by participants.

When a rideshare user pays $100 for a ride, the driver receives only a small portion. When a musician's song is listened to by millions, they only get a few cents from each dollar of revenue.

Wherever company-like networks dominate, the vast majority of value flows to intermediaries. Traditional corporate law protects these intermediaries and their investors, but users, creators, and workers are left unprotected.

For much of the time in the internet age, this trade-off was unavoidable. Open protocols lacked sustainable economic models to compete against the capital and coordination abilities behind company-like networks.

Blockchain changed that.

Blockchain and the software protocols deployed on it have given rise to a new type of system: blockchain networks. These networks are designed to have decentralized control, operate under transparent rules, and exist as shared infrastructure owned and operated by users.

The value of blockchain networks increases with public usage and can be distributed to participants—including those at the network's edges—rather than being taken only by central nodes.

Blockchain allows for "networks that truly operate like networks rather than like companies."

Blockchain technology is at a crucial moment. The past several platform transformations—personal computers, mobile phones, and the internet—are some of history’s most important technological innovations. The emergence of artificial intelligence is also quickly becoming one of them.

Yet all of these platform transformations ultimately led to a high concentration of power and control, where a few individuals decide the fates of countless consumers, creators, and developers who rely on these technologies and services.

As more and more economic activities become digitized and increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the question "who controls the digital systems we rely on" is becoming critical.

If this control continues to concentrate, then the ability to shape outcomes, limit access, and extract value will also follow suit: companies will dictate how networks operate and decide who benefits.

Decentralized blockchain networks provide an alternative path: an infrastructure that no single participant can easily rewrite, censor, or redirect.

In other words, these networks can help existing platforms decentralize, replacing them with networks that possess attributes of digital public goods—reducing lock-in effects, distributing control, embedding neutrality, lowering single points of failure risk, and returning ownership to users.

The design goal of the CLARITY Act is to make this path genuinely viable.

After the CLARITY enters full Senate consideration and updates, we will share more about what it specifically means for crypto builders.

However, if CLARITY passes through the next and final few steps of the legislative process, the U.S. legal framework will finally align with the essence of blockchain networks. Builders will be able to operate transparently, raise funds domestically, and build for the long term without having to make structural compromises due to regulatory ambiguity.

As more and more projects operate within the U.S. regulatory scope rather than outside of it, regulators and law enforcement will have better tools to combat the fraud and abuse that have long plagued this industry.

Once crypto achieves workable regulation, we have already seen what can happen: the GENIUS Act unleashed a wave of innovation overnight. Today, we can see crypto in several mainstream applications, from stablecoins to AI agents, and much more exciting growth is yet to come.

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