What happened
Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who sits on Senate Banking, signaled Wednesday he intends to drag the CLARITY Act onto the committee's markup calendar rather than let it sit in the limbo it has occupied since last year's House version cleared the floor. Crypto.News reported the move first, citing the senator's office. The procedural play matters because CLARITY has been the vehicle Republicans wanted for a comprehensive market-structure framework, and it had been losing momentum to narrower stablecoin-only bills.
The wrinkle is what Tillis wants to attach. According to the Crypto.News report, the markup version would fold in two of the most contentious unresolved questions in U.S. crypto policy: whether yield-bearing stablecoins are permitted under federal rules, and whether non-custodial developers, the people who write code for protocols like Uniswap or wallet software, get a statutory carve-out from money-transmitter and broker definitions. The non-custodial language tracks closely with what Sen. Cynthia Lummis has pushed in standalone form for two years.
Why it matters
The stablecoin-yield fight isn't an abstract debate. It splits the industry. Banks and the Treasury have argued that a stablecoin paying interest looks indistinguishable from a money-market fund and should be regulated like one. Issuers including Circle and several DeFi-native projects argue the opposite: that yield is the entire competitive moat against bank deposits and tokenized Treasuries from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton. The GENIUS Act, which Congress passed in 2024, deliberately punted the question. CLARITY would not.
The non-custodial developer piece is the other half of the bargain. Federal prosecutors have leaned on the existing money-transmitter framework to charge developers behind Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet, and the industry has spent two years arguing that writing open-source code is not the same as operating a financial institution. A Lummis-style carve-out would settle that fight by statute rather than leaving it to the courts.
