The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, or simply the Clarity Act, H.R.3633, is a bill currently before the United States Senate, after passing the House of Representatives in July. The Trump-backed bill proposes to create a regulatory framework and ethical guidelines for digital currencies, like Bitcoin. Now, the Senate seems to have shelved the measure after an increasingly rare bipartisan vote.
The Clarity Act failed to move through a key procedural hurdle on Tuesday, serving proponents of the bill, including major players in the cryptocurrency industry and the White House, a major blow in their pursuit of folding the novel currency into the nation’s web of financial regulations.
Democrats dealt the bill a mortal blow, but a handful of Republicans with outstanding concerns, including Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., were not assuaged, either. And with little time left on the Senate’s calendar and major bills piling up ahead of the midterm elections, the bill’s biggest backers believed that the Clarity Act might end up back on the shelf.
And, it would seem, back on the shelf it is. The primary author and proponent of the bill isn't sanguine about any chances of getting it through in what remains of this session.
"I think we're done. It's over," Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., the bill’s primary architect, said. "Because we've been working on this bill for over a year. And we've given them over 120 of their requests and that’s enough."
When asked if the bill would come back to the floor, Lummis said, "Nope."
A midnight hour update was made to the bill to try and pull anyone on the fence off to at least let the package move forward. But it wasn’t enough. And negotiations ran until the very end, just before the vote opened.
Cryptocurrency is something that's still pretty new and likely not very well understood by much of the population. It's not a currency in the traditional sense, as something being issued by any government, and anyone with an internet connection can send currency to anyone else. Some currencies, like Bitcoin, are capped at a fixed number of units available. As of this writing, the crypto market is valued at close to $3 trillion, but it's unclear what this value is based upon. No government backs the value of cryptocurrencies, and they aren't based on any hard assets like gold. It's a purely software-driven system. They aren't registered like stocks, either, although apparently the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into regulating these in the United States. The Clarity Act would have given the SEC some more authority over these digital assets.
If you're so inclined, you can track any future progress of this bill here. Its purpose is stated therein.
To provide for a system of regulation of the offer and sale of digital commodities by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to amend the Federal Reserve Act to prohibit the Federal Reserve banks from offering certain products or services directly to an individual, to prohibit the use of central bank digital currency for monetary policy, and for other purposes.
So, for now, in the digital asset world, things go on as they are, at least here in the United States.