Over 120 Crypto Groups Tell the U.S. Senate: Stop Stalling on the Market Structure Bill

Nine months after the House of Representatives passed it with strong bipartisan support, a major U.S. crypto market structure bill is still sitting in the Senate doing nothing. And the industry has had enough.

On April 23, more than 120 companies and organisations from across the digital asset world sent a joint letter to the Senate Banking Committee demanding it schedule a markup of the CLARITY Act without further delay. Signatories included Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, Uniswap Labs, Circle, Chainlink Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, OKX, Paradigm, and Block, alongside industry groups like the Crypto Council for Innovation, the Blockchain Association, the Texas Blockchain Council, and the Solana Policy Institute. It’s one of the broadest coordinated industry lobbying efforts crypto has ever mounted in Washington.

Their message was blunt: act now, or watch investment and jobs leave for jurisdictions that already have their rules sorted.

What the CLARITY Act Is and Why It Matters

CLARITY stands for Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and it’s essentially the companion piece to the GENIUS Act, which was signed into law last July and established the regulatory framework for payment stablecoins. Where the GENIUS Act sorted out stablecoins, CLARITY is supposed to sort out everything else: Bitcoin, Ethereum, altcoins, tokenised assets, and the exchanges and platforms that deal in them.

At its core, the bill tries to answer a question the U.S. crypto industry has been asking for years: who’s actually in charge here, the SEC or the CFTC? Right now, both agencies claim jurisdiction over parts of the crypto market, enforcement actions have been inconsistent, and companies genuinely don’t know which rules apply to them or which regulator they’ll end up fighting. CLARITY would draw a clear line between digital commodities (handled by the CFTC) and digital securities (handled by the SEC), and set out fit-for-purpose rules for each.

It passed the House on July 17, 2025, by a 308-to-122 vote. Bipartisan, decisive, the kind of margin that suggests it wasn’t particularly controversial among House members. Then it arrived in the Senate and basically stopped moving.

What Derailed It in January

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott had been moving toward a markup in January 2026. Fact sheets were published, the process looked like it was on track. Then Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly signalled reservations about the bill as written, and the markup was postponed within hours.

The primary sticking point was stablecoin yield. The Senate Banking Committee’s draft prohibited digital asset platforms from paying interest or yield to users simply for holding stablecoin balances, but did allow for activity-based rewards linked to payment transactions. That distinction mattered a lot commercially, because several crypto platforms had been offering yield on stablecoins as a major product feature, and a flat prohibition would have wiped that out.

Banking groups pushed back hard on the yield provisions from the other direction, arguing that letting crypto platforms pay yield on stablecoin holdings was essentially letting them do bank-like things without bank-like regulation. They asked for more time, lobbied committee members, and in the view of many industry observers, effectively used their institutional weight to slow things down.

Armstrong eventually reversed his position in a later public statement, backing the latest version of the bill. But the January delay had already knocked the committee off its schedule, and things haven’t recovered since.

Why the Industry Says the Clock Is Running Out

This isn’t just impatience. Senator Bernie Moreno, one of the bill’s key Senate supporters, said publicly at a Washington event on Wednesday that if CLARITY doesn’t reach the full Senate floor by the end of May, digital asset legislation may not advance at all before the midterm election cycle closes the window. Senator Cynthia Lummis was even more direct, saying this is “our last chance” and that missing the May deadline means waiting until at least 2030.

That’s not an unusual dynamic in U.S. legislative politics. As elections approach, senators become reluctant to take on contentious votes that could be used against them in campaigns. Crypto is still genuinely divisive in some constituencies, even if it’s been normalised in others. Miss the current window and you likely miss the Congress.

Galaxy Research has put 2026 passage odds at roughly 50-50. That’s not a confident number for an industry that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on political advocacy in 2024 and watched the GENIUS Act get signed into law earlier this year. There was a real sense that crypto had “won” in Washington. Now the harder, more technical work of writing market structure rules is running into the usual Senate friction.

What the Coalition Is Actually Asking For

The April 23 letter, addressed to Committee Chairman Tim Scott, Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis, and Ranking Member Ruben Gallego, asks the committee to formally notice and schedule a markup of CLARITY. It’s a procedural request, but a pointed one. It’s the industry saying: no more informal discussions, no more behind-the-scenes negotiations. Put it on the calendar and work through the text in public.

The letter also spells out the policy priorities the coalition wants protected as the bill moves forward. They want clear, formal boundaries between SEC and CFTC jurisdiction so companies know which regulator applies to which activity. They want non-custodial software developers, people building the underlying code for DeFi protocols and open-source tools, protected from being classified as brokers and subjected to registration requirements that were never designed for them. They want simpler disclosure rules for token issuers that actually fit how digital assets work, rather than forcing crypto projects to comply with securities disclosure frameworks designed for equity offerings.

Stablecoin rewards come up too. The coalition wants activity-based consumer rewards tied to payment stablecoins preserved, signalling that the yield question isn’t fully resolved even among bill supporters.

And they want a federal framework that pre-empts a patchwork of conflicting state rules. Several U.S. states have already passed or are considering their own digital asset laws, and without a federal baseline, companies would eventually have to comply with 50 different regulatory regimes simultaneously.

The Banking Industry’s Role in the Delay

Banks have been a consistent source of friction in the CLARITY Act process, and the April 23 letter arrived just days after another banking-related delay. On April 21, the American Bankers Association asked four U.S. government agencies for a 60-day extension to comment on GENIUS Act implementation regulations, after the OCC finalised its initial rules. If granted, that extension would push back the full implementation timeline for stablecoin regulation, which in turn affects how quickly CLARITY’s provisions could interact with the established stablecoin framework.

Banking groups’ concerns aren’t entirely without merit. Crypto platforms offering yield on stable, dollar-pegged assets do start to look like financial products that compete directly with bank savings accounts, and banks operate under much stricter capital and regulatory requirements than crypto firms currently do. The question of whether that’s fair is genuinely contested.

But from the industry’s perspective, the pattern is clear. Each time crypto legislation gets close to moving, a banking group files a letter asking for more time, or raises a new concern, or requests a comment period extension. Anil Oncu, CEO of Bitpace, put it plainly in comments to Disruption Banking: “While Washington argues over regulatory perimeters, adoption is rendering the ‘banks versus crypto’ framing obsolete.”

What This Means for Canada

Canadians watching U.S. crypto regulation might reasonably ask: why does this matter to me? Quite a bit, it turns out.

Canada’s crypto regulatory framework has developed in relative isolation, and in some areas it’s ahead of the U.S. FINTRAC registration requirements, provincial securities oversight through the CSA, and the CARF reporting framework are all in place. But Canada is a small market operating beside the world’s largest one. What the U.S. decides about who regulates crypto, how digital assets are classified, and what rules exchanges must follow will shape global industry norms and the behaviour of platforms that serve Canadian users.

If the CLARITY Act passes and brings major U.S. exchanges fully into a regulatory framework, it sets an international standard that other jurisdictions, including Canada, will be benchmarked against. If it fails, the U.S. crypto market continues to operate under ad-hoc enforcement while competitors in Europe, the UK, Hong Kong, and Singapore consolidate their own frameworks. Canadian companies and investors don’t avoid the consequences either way.

There’s also the talent and capital migration argument the letter makes explicitly. If the U.S. still doesn’t have market structure rules by late 2026, some of that activity moves to better-regulated jurisdictions. Canada has occasionally benefited from that kind of U.S. regulatory uncertainty in the past. Whether it would again depends on whether Ottawa moves to capitalise on it.

The Quick Summary

• April 23, 2026: More than 120 crypto companies and groups sent a joint letter to the Senate Banking Committee demanding an immediate markup of the CLARITY Act.
• Key signatories include Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, Circle, Uniswap Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, the Blockchain Association, and the Crypto Council for Innovation.
• CLARITY passed the House in July 2025 but has been stalled in the Senate since a markup was postponed in January, partly due to disputes over stablecoin yield and banking industry pushback.
• The May window is critical. Senators Moreno and Lummis have both warned that missing it likely means no bill until 2030 at the earliest.
• Key issues the coalition wants resolved: clear SEC vs CFTC jurisdictional lines, protection for non-custodial developers, simplified disclosure rules, stablecoin rewards, and a federal framework that supersedes state-by-state patchwork.
• For Canadians: U.S. market structure rules will shape global norms and affect the behaviour of platforms serving Canadian users, regardless of how domestic rules develop.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or legal advice. Regulatory developments described reflect conditions as of April 24, 2026, and may change as the legislative process continues.