Lummis Pushes the CLARITY Act to Export Wyoming’s Crypto Banks

Senator Cynthia Lummis said on September 3 that the CLARITY Act would take Wyoming’s digital-asset rulebook nationwide, the payoff of a state experiment built around four special bank charters. The Wyoming Republican argued her state wrote usable rules years before Washington did, and that the Senate bill would copy that instinct: clear rules that keep builders in the United States.

Her audience is the Senate. The companies with the most at stake already live under the Wyoming statutes she wants to copy, including the special purpose depository institutions the state’s banking board has approved.

The Four Banks Behind Lummis’s Pitch

The Wyoming Division of Banking describes SPDIs as fully reserved banks that take deposits and do work incidental to banking, including custody, asset servicing, and fiduciary asset management. They are built to hold virtual currency, digital securities, and digital consumer assets, and they sit under digital-asset rules that plug into the Wyoming Uniform Commercial Code.

They are also narrow on purpose. SPDIs may not make loans with customer deposits of fiat currency, and those deposits must be backed at all times by 100% or more in unencumbered liquid assets, including U.S. currency and level 1 high-quality liquid assets. Because of that reserve rule, they are not required to carry FDIC insurance, though they may obtain it.

Wyoming authorized the charter in 2019 through House Bill 74, now Wyo. Stat. § 13-12-101. The same year, Senate File 125 created the state’s digital-asset property law at Wyo. Stat. § 34-29-101. The Division has taken applications since October 1, 2019, and the Wyoming Banking Board has approved four SPDI charters thus far.

HOW A WYOMING CHARTER WORKS

• Reserve rule: Customer fiat deposits stay matched by unencumbered liquid assets at 100% or more, so the bank is not a fractional lender.
• Permitted work: Custody, safekeeping, asset servicing, fiduciary management, and cash-management accounts are in bounds; fiat lending with customer deposits is not.
• Supervision: The Wyoming Division of Banking examines the charter, and call reports become public once an SPDI opens for business.
• Property law: Separate 2019 statutes define digital assets and set how security interests attach, which is the legal hook for custody and lending against tokens.

Four charters in seven years of applications is a small club, not a boomtown. Kraken Financial took the first one in September 2020. Custodia Bank, led by Caitlin Long, followed. Bank Wyse, operated by Wyoming Deposit & Transfer, holds another. The Division does not publish a marketing roster on its charter page, and several of the names have spent more time waiting on federal plumbing than taking deposits.

That wait is the hidden stake. A Wyoming charter can custody crypto under state law. It cannot move dollars through the core U.S. payment system until the Federal Reserve grants a master account. Lummis has spent years pushing that door. The CLARITY Act is the next attempt to write the state’s model into federal statute so those banks are not stranded as a state curiosity.

What Lummis Means by a Wyoming Approach

She means property-law definitions for tokens, a split between commodities and securities, and banks that hold cash one-for-one instead of lending it. The Senate bill tries to copy that split nationwide and, a July briefing in Cheyenne said, add bank-supervision language meant to help Wyoming’s SPDIs grow.

On September 3 she put the claim in her own words.

Wyoming built a legal framework for digital assets companies years before Washington even started paying attention to digital assets, and we’ve proven it works. The Clarity Act takes that same instinct, clear rules that keep builders here, and applies it nationally.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, on X

https://x.com/SenLummis/status/2095542095171690761

Wyoming has passed more than two dozen blockchain-related laws since 2018, and it was still amending the SPDI statute in 2026. Senate File 55, signed in March, changed capital, charter-application, supervision-fee, and resolution-fund rules, with most of those amendments effective July 1, 2026. The state did not freeze its experiment and wait for Congress. It kept writing.

The federal vehicle is H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, introduced May 29, 2025, by Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.). The House passed it July 17, 2025, by 294-134. Congress.gov still lists the bill as Passed House. Latest action is the Senate cloture motion on the motion to proceed, presented August 8, 2026.

CRS describes the House text as a system that sends digital-commodity trading to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, leaves the Securities and Exchange Commission over digital-asset securities, and sets rules on trade monitoring, recordkeeping, and the mixing of customer assets. Tokens on a “mature” blockchain, meaning one that has reached decentralized control as the bill defines it, can avoid SEC registration if sales stay under a set amount and other tests are met.

WYOMING LAW AND THE FEDERAL BILL

That table is a map, not a photocopy. Federal text will not clone every Wyoming section. It does try to take the state’s basic bet, that builders stay when the statute book is readable, and apply it in Washington.

The 2018 Utility Token Bill Lives On in CLARITY

On July 14, 2026, a briefing to Wyoming’s Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology and Digital Innovation Technology made the lineage explicit. A speaker updating the committee on Lummis’s work said the CLARITY Act is braided with the approach Wyoming took on how to draw the line between a security and a commodity.

The speaker pointed back to the 2018 utility token bill run by Sen. Chris Rothfuss (D-Laramie) and then-Rep. Tyler Lindholm, and said the federal bill builds on that line. The same briefing said bank-supervision provisions in the legislation would be helpful to Wyoming SPDIs and would let that model grow further. The claim was not that Cheyenne invented every title in a 600-page merge. It was that the state’s early token statute is the ancestor of the split now sitting on the Senate calendar.

Lindholm later joined Lummis’s Senate shop as state policy director. The personnel trail matches the drafting trail. Wyoming’s blockchain committee spent years on definitions that other states treated as optional. Lummis is now trying to make those definitions the national default.

Customer-asset language follows the same pattern. Wyoming’s custody rules already told SPDIs to segregate assets held under bailment and to treat digital-asset servicing as a distinct book of business. The federal bill would classify digital assets held for customers as customer property in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, keeping those holdings out of the failed company’s estate. After FTX, that clause is the part retail users can explain without a glossary.

Developer language sits next to it. The House-passed structure would not automatically treat people who ship software without controlling customer funds as if they were centralized intermediaries. Lummis pressed the same line in standalone form on January 12, 2026, when she and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill to keep developers who do not control user funds from being classed as money transmitters. “This designation makes no sense when they never touch, control, or have access to user funds,” Lummis said then.

Kraken Took Its Wyoming Charter to the Fed

Kraken is the proof of concept Lummis can point to without a hypothetical. Kraken Financial holds the first-ever US crypto bank charter, a Wyoming SPDI recognized under state and federal law, and it was the first digital-asset bank to receive a Federal Reserve master account. Client fiat deposits under that charter are backed 100% by unencumbered reserves.

The charter arrived in September 2020. The bank took its first deposit in March 2024. The master account arrived in March 2026 after a 65-month application, issued as a limited-purpose account with a one-year initial term, Fedwire access for wholesale settlement, and layered oversight by the Wyoming Division of Banking and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It is not FDIC-insured and it does not include emergency lending.

That timeline is the industrial policy in miniature. Wyoming could write a bank statute in a single session. It could not force the Fed’s door. Lummis called the master account a path between dollars and digital assets and said earlier administrations had blocked similar firms from the payment system. Banking trade groups pushed back, arguing a Kansas City Fed decision jumped ahead of Board comment and that community banks would face new stability risk.

Kraken did not treat the charter as a paper trophy. The exchange moved its headquarters to Cheyenne in 2025. In 2026 it pledged money into Trump Accounts for Wyoming newborns, a loyalty marker in the state that wrote its banking law. Parent company Payward has also filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust company, which would put the same firm under a state bank charter and a federal trust charter at once if the OCC approves.

That dual filing is the tell. Wyoming got Kraken in the door. Kraken is still shopping for a federal overlay, because a state SPDI, even one with a master account, is not the whole map.

National Trust Charters Already Sell the Same Custody

The overlooked contest is not only Senate math. It is charter competition. On December 12, 2025, the OCC conditionally approved five national-trust applications at once, mixing de novo filings and conversions of state trust companies. Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos were in that wave. A national trust charter does not take deposits or make loans. It does give a crypto custodian one federal supervisor and national reach, which is the product SPDIs were invented to sell inside one state.

Julie Fellows, co-founder of Bank Wyse, said federally chartered banks can now compete with SPDIs with fewer requirements. Her own charter later became an acquisition target for Datavault AI, a deal structured so extra cash arrives only if Bank Wyse is allowed to open to customers. The purchase price on a still-dark charter is a market quote on how scarce Wyoming paper remains, and on how unfinished the original bet still is.

If CLARITY’s bank-supervision titles do what the July briefing promised, Wyoming SPDIs get a federal blessing they have lacked. If the OCC path keeps expanding, the blessing arrives after the exclusive franchise is already gone. Lummis can still argue the state’s rulebook is the template. She cannot argue it is the only template.

September 15 Tests Cloture, Not Final Passage

The next number on the calendar is procedural. Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 on August 8, 2026. The vote is set for September 15. Cloture on a motion to proceed takes 60 votes. It does not pass the bill. It only lets the Senate begin.

Republicans hold 53 seats. If every Republican is present and voting yes, backers still need 7 votes from Democrats or independents. Senate Banking advanced the bill 15-9 on May 14, 2026, with Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) joining all 13 committee Republicans. Both Democrats treated that markup vote as conditional. The merged summer text then snagged on ethics, including how to police official-family digital-asset promotion.

THE PATH TO A SEPTEMBER 15 VOTE

1. May 29, 2025: Rep. French Hill introduces H.R. 3633, with 21 House cosponsors by the time it leaves that chamber.
2. July 17, 2025: The House passes the bill 294-134 and sends it to the Senate.
3. May 14, 2026: Senate Banking orders the bill reported 15-9 with a substitute amendment.
4. June 1, 2026: The bill lands on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423.
5. August 8, 2026: Thune presents a cloture motion on the motion to proceed, locking a post-recess vote.
6. September 15, 2026: The Senate holds that cloture test; a second 60-vote sequence would still be required on the bill itself.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said he expects the Senate to advance the legislation and hopes it can reach President Donald Trump. Agency work is not waiting on the floor. Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig have already described a joint “Project Crypto” track that could write market rules even if the statute slips.

The House calendar is the other trap. Leadership has canceled sessions in the second half of September ahead of the midterm recess. Any Senate rewrite that has to go back to the House can miss that window. Democrats still want changes to the ethics language that still blocks a floor deal, and an earlier stall already left the bill racing a midterm clock. A cloture win on September 15 would start debate. It would not, by itself, put Wyoming’s statute book into the U.S. Code.

Cheyenne Still Has to Keep Its Graduates

Lummis has never sold the project as a favor to exchanges alone. At the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in August 2026 she said the point of putting digital-asset law in the state was to keep people there. Wyoming, she said, ranks first in the share of college graduates who leave, and she wants an industry that can employ engineers and keep them in-state. She tied Kraken’s newborn-account pledge to that same goal.

Federalizing the market rules does not retire Wyoming as a formation state. The state still offers DAO LLCs, no personal income tax, and a Secretary of State shop that knows digital-asset filings. Incorporation mills treated Lummis’s September 3 post as a sales cue within hours, pitching Wyoming entities as the wrapper under coming federal rules. That is a real business. It is not the bank franchise she spent a decade building.

The state also launched its own Frontier Stable Token, FRNT, with public purchase opening January 7, 2026, through Kraken. Monthly attestations on reserves have run since October 31, 2025. That product lives on Wyoming law and a Wyoming-domiciled exchange. It does not need CLARITY to exist. It does need the state’s crypto banks and its political brand to remain more than a drafting credit in a Senate bill.

On September 15 the Senate will decide whether to take the bill up. The four SPDI charters will still be Wyoming charters the next morning, with the same reserve rule, the same Fed bottleneck, and the same OCC competitors. Lummis can export the instinct. She cannot export the map.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of pending U.S. legislation and related state banking charters, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, legal advice, tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital asset, to open an account at any bank or exchange, or to form an entity in Wyoming or any other state. Readers should consult a licensed attorney and a qualified financial adviser before acting on securities, commodities, banking, bankruptcy, or money-transmitter rules that may apply to digital assets. Vote dates, bill text, charter statuses, and agency positions reflect the cited official records and statements as of the dates named above and can change as the Senate, the House, the Federal Reserve, and the OCC move.