U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs outlines CLARITY Act digital asset regulatory framework ahead of procedural markup

The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs published a “Myth vs. Fact” explainer on the CLARITY Act, describing the bill as comprehensive digital asset market structure legislation intended to replace fragmented oversight with a clear federal regulatory framework. The document is framed around upcoming Senate consideration and a Senate Banking Committee procedural markup. The Committee says the bill would use longstanding securities law principles to distinguish digital asset securities from commodities, require covered entities to make disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), apply resale restrictions, and include anti-evasion protections while preserving the SEC’s enforcement authority over digital asset securities. It also sets out a jurisdictional allocation between the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), creates a joint SEC-CFTC Advisory Committee to harmonize requirements, and includes an illicit finance framework that would apply anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism obligations to key intermediaries, strengthen sanctions compliance, and authorize the Treasury Department to address high-risk foreign activity; for decentralized finance, it describes sanctions clarifications, risk management standards for centralized intermediaries interacting with DeFi protocols, and tailored rulemaking for intermediaries that are not truly decentralized, while explicitly protecting software developers and the right to self-custody.