What happened
Senate Majority Leader has filed cloture on the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins and Digital Asset Market Structure Act, known as the CLARITY Act, with the vote set for Monday, Sept. 15, according to reporting from Crypto. News on Sunday.
Cloture is the procedural motion that ends debate and moves a bill to a final vote. It requires 60 senators to agree. With Republicans holding a slim majority, sponsors need a handful of Democrats to cross the aisle before the bill can advance to floor debate.
The legislation itself would rewrite how the U. S. regulates digital assets, splitting jurisdiction between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Under the current draft, most spot-market activity in tokens deemed sufficiently decentralized would fall under the CFTC. The SEC would retain oversight of tokens still classified as securities, along with token issuance and investment-contract structures.
Why it matters
This is the closest a comprehensive U. S. crypto market structure bill has come to a floor vote since FIT21 cleared the House in 2024.
A successful cloture vote on Monday would open debate on a framework the industry has lobbied for since the collapse of FTX in 2022. A failed one sends sponsors back to the negotiating table with recess pressure mounting. The stakes are structural, not cosmetic.
Exchanges, custodians, and token issuers have been operating under enforcement-by-guidance from the SEC for years. CLARITY would replace that with a statutory definition of a digital commodity, and it would create a registration path at the CFTC for spot venues. That changes the compliance calculus for every U.