Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Overseas cryptocurrency media Decrypt reported this morning that, according to informed sources, representatives from Wall Street and the cryptocurrency industry held an offline closed-door meeting yesterday to resolve differences over the upcoming cryptocurrency market structure bill (i.e., CLARITY) to be reviewed by the Senate.
No public information about this closed-door meeting had previously been leaked, but according to Decrypt's report, the Wall Street main trade organization "Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)" participated in the discussion. This organization had previously opposed the core content of the CLARITY Act, including explicitly opposing the regulatory exemption clauses for decentralized financial services like DeFi and their developers. Informed sources revealed that yesterday's talks were "constructive" and "productive" on divisive issues such as DeFi regulation.
Breakdown of CLARITY's Core Content
CLARITY stands for "Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025". The bill was initially proposed on May 29, 2025, by House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill and Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson. This bill aims to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets, clearly distinguish the classification of digital assets, and divide the regulatory responsibilities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The top law firm Arnold & Porter has provided a detailed interpretation of the specifics of this bill. Specifically, CLARITY hopes to divide digital assets into three clear categories — digital commodities, investment contract assets, and compliant payment stablecoins.
"Digital commodity" refers to a digital asset intrinsically linked to a blockchain system, whose value directly depends on the functionality or operation of the blockchain system, or on the activities or functions served when the blockchain was created or used. In other words, the value of such digital assets must rely on the functionality of the blockchain network itself, such as payments, governance, on-chain service access, incentive composition, etc. It is worth noting that the bill explicitly excludes financial instruments such as securities, derivatives, and stablecoins from the definition of "digital commodity".
"Investment contract asset" refers to a digital commodity that simultaneously meets the following conditions — first, it can be exclusively held and transferred peer-to-peer without an intermediary; second, it is recorded on a blockchain; third, it has been or is planned to be sold or transferred under an investment contract (i.e., for financing purposes). This means that if a digital commodity is sold in a financing scenario (e.g., an ICO), it will be recognized as an investment contract asset and treated as a security, falling under SEC regulation. Simultaneously, the CLARITY Act also separates this type of investment contract asset from the traditional definition of "investment contract" under U.S. securities law.
However, the security nature of an investment contract asset is "temporary". Once the digital asset is resold or transferred by a third party other than the issuer or its agent, the asset will no longer be considered a security, even if it was initially issued as an investment contract asset. That is, when the asset enters the secondary market for trading, it no longer meets the definition of an investment contract asset and will be considered a pure digital commodity.
"Compliant payment stablecoin" refers to a digital asset that meets the following conditions — first, its designed use is as a means of payment or settlement; second, it is denominated in a fiat currency; third, the issuer is regulated and examined by state or federal regulators; fourth, the issuer has an obligation to redeem it at a fixed monetary value.
- Odaily Note: Compared to the classification of commodity and security attributes, stablecoin-related content is not the core of the CLARITY Act, but it is one of the current focal points of disagreement regarding the bill. The GENIUS Act, which has already passed both houses of Congress and was signed by Trump, implicitly allowed yield-bearing stablecoins pegged to the U.S. dollar, while SIFMA and banking industry lobbying teams hope to ban related content through CLARITY.
Based on this classification, CLARITY also clarifies the regulatory responsibilities of the two major agencies: the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
- Specifically, CLARITY will grant CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over anti-fraud and anti-manipulation enforcement for digital commodities (including cash or spot transactions), and will also require intermediaries handling digital commodities — including currently dominant cryptocurrency exchanges or other brokers and dealers — to register with the CFTC.
- Regarding the SEC, CLARITY will grant it exclusive jurisdiction over the issuers and issuance activities of investment contract assets, including responsible for related registration, information disclosure, and continuous reporting obligations. The SEC will also maintain anti-fraud and anti-manipulation jurisdiction over digital commodity transactions conducted by brokers, dealers, or national securities exchanges registered with the SEC.
- For compliant payment stablecoins, their issuers will be primarily regulated by banking regulators, but the CFTC and SEC will respectively maintain anti-fraud and anti-manipulation jurisdiction over transactions on their registered platforms.
What is the Significance of CLARITY?
In summary, CLARITY aims to establish a clear, functional federal regulatory framework for the U.S. digital asset market, solving the long-standing problems of regulatory ambiguity and inconsistent enforcement.
Over the past five years, the博弈 (game/struggle) between the SEC and CFTC over digital asset regulatory authority has shaped the overall landscape of cryptocurrency regulation in the United States.
During the tenure of former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, the agency's stance was that "the vast majority of digital assets are securities," its core basis being the Howey test established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946. The SEC thus argued that most token sales constitute investment contracts and should therefore be subject to federal securities regulation. This interpretation laid the foundation for the SEC's aggressive enforcement actions, during which it initiated dozens of high-profile enforcement actions against token issuers, crypto exchanges, and related service providers.
In contrast, the CFTC has been more willing to view some digital assets as commodities, especially those with a higher degree of decentralization and that do not directly generate profits. Although the CFTC has consistently sought to expand its regulatory role in the cryptocurrency market and has repeatedly warned that the "regulatory vacuum" caused by unclear responsibilities could endanger market integrity, the current Commodity Exchange Act imposes limitations on the CFTC's authority in the spot commodity market, confining its power mainly to anti-fraud and anti-manipulation enforcement.
The ongoing competition between the SEC and CFTC over jurisdictional scope has kept market participants and crypto developers in a gray area for a long time — they cannot determine whether their products or services should be regulated by securities law or commodity law. CLARITY is a legislative response against the backdrop of this regulatory stalemate, aiming to establish a stable, clear, and long-lasting framework for dividing responsibilities between the SEC and CFTC through legislation.
For the cryptocurrency industry, the implementation of CLARITY would mean a substantive shift in the regulatory environment, namely, a more predictable compliance path in the future. Market participants will be able to clearly know which activities, products, and transactions fall under regulatory scope, thereby reducing long-term regulatory uncertainty, lowering litigation risks and regulatory friction, and subsequently attracting more innovators and traditional financial institutions to enter the market.
As for more direct market impact, although a breakthrough at key junctures (such as the recent Senate review) of CLARITY could trigger short-term news-driven positive effects, its longer-term impact lies in making cryptocurrency a "asset class more easily allocated by traditional capital." By resolving institutional uncertainty, it allows long-term capital that was previously unable to enter to obtain compliant entry paths, thereby raising the valuation floor of the entire market.
CLARITY Progress? What are the Obstacles?
On July 17 last year, CLARITY smoothly passed review in the U.S. House of Representatives by an overwhelming majority (vote count approximately 294–134). However, unlike the smoothly progressing GENIUS at the same time, CLARITY encountered resistance when subsequently transferred to the Senate due to disagreements among various parties.
Overall, the disagreements surrounding CLARITY mainly focus on the regulatory approach to DeFi, the issue of yield-bearing stablecoins, and the ethical norms of the Trump family, among others.
Among these, regulation targeting DeFi is the most sensitive point of disagreement. Advocates in the cryptocurrency field hope to protect developers and open-source software, believing that code should not be considered a regulated financial intermediary; but Wall Street has expressed concerns citing money laundering, evasion of sanctions, and national security risks, arguing that if such safeguards are too broad, they could bring risks, and therefore strongly demand bringing DeFi into the scope of traditional financial regulation.
Another key disagreement lies in yield-bearing stablecoins. As mentioned earlier, GENIUS implicitly allowed the existence of this type of stablecoin, but major U.S. banks have been actively lobbying to prohibit stablecoin issuers from transferring the yield from reserve assets (such as Treasury bonds) to holders, to prevent this window from causing deposits to flow out of the traditional banking system; the cryptocurrency industry is obviously unwilling to be shackled. Industry representatives, while criticizing the protectionism of the banking industry, also emphasize that GENIUS has already addressed the regulatory and licensing issues related to stablecoins, and there is no need to revisit the discussion.
Because disagreements persist, the bill was originally scheduled for review in the middle of last year, but was then pushed to October, then to the end of last year, and then postponed to 2026... Until this Tuesday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott officially announced that the committee will vote on the bill on January 15.
Tim Scott is a Republican Senator from South Carolina. Although the cryptocurrency industry generally believes that the January 15 schedule is too rushed,不利于 (not conducive to) resolving differences, and may even ruin the bill's chance of approval this year, Tim Scott insisted on this arrangement. In an interview with Breitbart, Tim Scott said: "I think we have to make a public statement and vote. Therefore, next Thursday we will vote on CLARITY. Over the past six months or more, through unremitting efforts, we have ensured that every member of the committee has seen multiple drafts."
So the current situation is that next week's vote will determine whether CLARITY can pass the Senate Banking Committee — this is a crucial step before CLARITY is finally submitted to the full Senate for review, and only if it gains bipartisan support in the committee review does it have a chance to ultimately pass the Senate. But according to multiple reports, it is still unclear whether the bill has enough votes to pass the committee's review.
Although the closed-door meeting mentioned at the beginning of this article brought some positive news, it is still not enough to guarantee a smooth passage in next week's vote. In Decrypt's report, even a representative from the cryptocurrency industry bluntly stated: "I can't believe we're finally seeing Democrats and Republicans proactively cooperating on something, and we might kill it because of an arbitrary schedule."
Jake Ostrovskis, OTC负责人 (Head) at Wintermute, mentioned the time生死线 (life-and-deadline) for CLARITY to break through the Senate from a longer-term perspective: "The market generally believes that April is the last realistic deadline for a full Senate vote (before the political storm of the midterm elections erupts), and to achieve this, the SEC and CFTC need to reach an agreement on amendments by the end of January. This matter is likely to be further politicized, so expect related news reports throughout January as the situation develops."
In short, next week's Senate Banking Committee vote will kick off CLARITY's闯关 (breakthrough)序幕 (prelude). The current situation remains unclear, but a clear directional expectation will be seen next week.
