The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act hit the U.S. Senate’s Legislative Calendar on June 1, clearing five of nine procedural steps toward becoming law. Three weeks after the Senate Banking Committee’s 15-9 vote moved it out of committee, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) gave the clearest public read yet on the floor vote’s timing: “I think it’s possible, but maybe more likely we finish it before the August recess.”
The Trump administration had been targeting a presidential signature by July 4. Lummis, the bill’s most consistent Senate champion, told journalist Eleanor Terrett this week that cloture math and a multi-bill merge make the earlier deadline unlikely in practice.
From Committee to Calendar
The legislation has been moving through Congress since May 2025, when Representative French Hill of Arkansas introduced the House version. The House passed it in July of that year by 294 to 134. Two parallel Senate drafts then ran simultaneously: one from the Senate Banking Committee and a separate digital commodity framework from the Senate Agriculture Committee, which advanced its own version in January 2026. The current bill traces its lineage to the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which passed the House in May 2024 but stalled in the Senate, requiring both chambers to rebuild the framework from the ground up.
The bill draws a hard line between two federal regulators: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) would receive exclusive authority over spot and cash markets for digital commodities on decentralized blockchains, while the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) retains oversight over investment contract assets. Bitcoin and Ethereum would be permanently classified as non-securities under the framework.
The Banking Committee version spent four months in negotiations over stablecoin yield treatment, decentralized finance (DeFi) developer liability, and that regulatory boundary. Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott described the May 14 committee result as a historic bipartisan advance, a 15-9 vote with all 13 Republicans joined by Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland.
Calendar placement under General Orders, No. 423, followed on June 1. Being on the calendar means the bill is formally in the queue and eligible for full Senate consideration, per the bill’s legislative record on Congress.gov. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has not set a floor date.
The Four-Part Assembly
Before Thune can schedule a floor vote, four legislative components have to be unified into a single text. Lummis laid out the list directly in her conversation with Terrett:
- The Senate Banking Committee version, cleared May 14.
- The Senate Agriculture Committee’s parallel digital commodity framework, advanced in January 2026.
- Ethics provisions that Democratic senators have demanded as a condition for their floor votes.
- Revisions to the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act), the stablecoin regulation law that cleared the Senate 68-30.
The Banking and Agriculture merge alone is a staff-level process that typically takes weeks. As the U.S. Crypto Policy Tracker maintained by Latham & Watkins documents, the two committee drafts diverge on CFTC enforcement powers, oversight of decentralized exchanges, and how prediction markets are treated. Once a unified text exists, it goes through floor debate and amendments before any cloture vote can happen. Lummis said she has been coordinating with Senators Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina to assemble the final package.
Lummis cited the Working Families Tax Cut as legislation Congress passed in “record time,” suggesting July remains possible. This bill has a four-part merge and an ethics negotiation standing between the current moment and any scheduled floor date, with no equivalent combination in that tax bill’s path to passage.
Seven Votes and the Ethics Standoff
The Senate’s 53 Republicans aren’t enough to reach the 60-vote cloture threshold. At least seven Democrats have to cross over.
- 60 votes required for cloture under Senate filibuster rules
- 53 Senate Republicans, all assumed yes
- 7 Democratic floor votes still needed to reach 60
- 11-13 the committee vote rejecting the Van Hollen ethics amendment on May 14
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) filed an amendment during the May 14 markup that would have barred the president, vice president, and other senior government officials from holding business ties to digital asset companies. It failed 11-13. Gallego, one of the two Democrats who voted yes in committee, said on that same day: “I want to be clear that my vote here does not guarantee a vote on the floor.” He and Alsobrooks both conditioned their support on the ethics question being resolved before any floor vote takes place, not afterward.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), one of crypto’s most consistent Democratic supporters and widely viewed as a key swing-vote anchor for crossing 60, told the Consensus Miami conference in May that Democrats will not back the bill without a strong ethics provision. Cody Carbone, who heads the Digital Chamber trade association, told reporters that leadership won’t bring the bill to the floor until it’s confident cloture is in reach, meaning the ethics deal has to close first.
The White House has drawn its own position. Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told the Consensus Miami audience the administration can accept ethics rules applying “across the board, from the president all the way down to the brand new intern on Capitol Hill,” but not language targeting the president specifically. President Trump’s family holds active digital asset business interests, including through World Liberty Financial.
The Floor Calendar’s Other Tenants
Closing the ethics deal and finishing the merge still leaves one constraint: floor time is finite, and June is already crowded.
The Senate returned from its Memorial Day recess on June 3. Congress has roughly four working weeks left in June and three more in July before the August recess begins. The CLARITY Act competes for those weeks with budget reconciliation, FISA reauthorization, and a housing bill that cleared the House this spring. Journalist Eleanor Terrett flagged the competition in May, noting the bill would fight for floor minutes alongside reconciliation and the housing legislation. Majority Leader Thune has indicated reconciliation is the chamber’s first priority through much of June, leaving the CLARITY Act in a queue with no confirmed place in the schedule.
Former Senate aide Anne Kelly told industry observers that passage before August “just got more challenging,” citing Senate floor time as Washington’s scarcest resource. Lummis has said publicly that failing to pass the legislation in this window could push the next viable chance to 2030: a new Congress after November’s midterms would restart the process from scratch, and midterm campaign cycles typically absorb the floor bandwidth that comprehensive regulatory overhauls require.
Competing Pressure on the Senate Floor
Three distinct advocacy efforts converged this week around the bill’s fate.
On June 2, the Blockchain Association sent a letter to Thune and Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, signed by 160 former national security, intelligence, and law enforcement officials. The letter argued digital asset market structure is a law enforcement and national security priority, citing specific tools in the bill: extended Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions obligations for digital commodity brokers, dealers, and exchanges, plus a Treasury-led information-sharing mechanism with the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The signatories, their arguments, and the prior national security case for the bill are covered in this publication’s earlier report on the CLARITY Act and national security.
It is critical for the United States that this activity occurs under American rules, with American oversight, and subject to American Law.
The Blockchain Association followed the letter with meetings across 18 Senate offices and a virtual town hall on June 4, featuring Lummis, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and Witt.
A newly formed political action committee (PAC) called Defend Developers is pressing from a separate angle: statutory protections for open-source software engineers and DeFi builders who built decentralized systems without centralized control over user activity. Developer liability provisions became one of the sharper fault lines in committee negotiations, a dynamic covered in prior reporting on what CLARITY Act collapse would mean for crypto developers.
JPMorgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon landed on the opposing side. On May 29, he said banks will fight the bill because it puts stablecoin issuers on unequal regulatory footing with banks and lacks adequate anti-money laundering (AML) protections. Lummis responded on CNBC on June 3: “He either hasn’t read the bill, or he wants to mislead people.” She pointed to more than 1,600 references to existing AML and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) requirements in the bill’s text, and called Dimon’s remarks about Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong “distasteful.”
Can the Senate Clear 60 Before August Recess?
Analysts and prediction markets have notably different answers.
| Source | 2026 Passage Odds | Timeline Estimate | Key Constraint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Galaxy Research (Alex Thorn) | 75% | Signing week of Aug. 3 | Assumes ethics deal closes before floor |
| Polymarket | 55% | Not specified | Down ~10 points from recent highs |
| Kalshi | 27% by Aug.; 38% before year-end | Ambiguous | Floor calendar uncertainty |
| TD Cowen | Not specified | Risk of 2027 slippage | Floor time doesn’t open in June |
Galaxy Digital backed its research team’s view with a $10 million institutional prediction market trade on the bill passing in 2026, executed through its over-the-counter (OTC) offering with Arca. Alex Thorn, Galaxy Research’s head of research, puts the realistic signing date at the week of August 3 if Congress holds current pace. That 75% figure sits well above where Polymarket’s crowd settled, at 55%, itself down roughly 10 percentage points from levels recorded before the calendar placement. Kalshi’s 27% probability of passage specifically by August captures the narrower question: not whether the bill passes in 2026, but whether it clears the floor before the recess deadline.
TD Cowen analysts warn that slippage into 2027 is plausible if the floor calendar stays closed through June. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the competitive stakes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: blockchain developers and crypto companies migrating to Singapore and Abu Dhabi as a direct consequence of U.S. regulatory ambiguity. A16z Crypto has separately noted the United States is already behind Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) framework and the United Kingdom’s own stablecoin rulemaking push.
The floor vote is in Thune’s queue, date unannounced, waiting on the ethics deal that has been unresolved since the May 14 markup.
