US Crypto Market Structure Law 2026: CLARITY Act, SEC vs CFTC

On 15 September 2026, the US Senate voted 49 to 50 on whether to move ahead with the CLARITY Act. The bill needed 60. Within days, the chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were promising to write the rules themselves. That vote, and what followed it, tells you most of what you need to know about American crypto regulation in 2026: Congress has written the outline, and the agencies are now drawing inside it without waiting for a signature.

This piece explains what the market structure bill would do, how far it got, the fault lines that stopped it, and what actually changes for exchanges, token issuers and users while the law sits unfinished.

What "market structure" means and why it matters

The US already has a stablecoin law. The GENIUS Act cleared the House 308 to 122 on 17 July 2025 and was signed the next day, as The Block reported. That law governs who may issue a payment stablecoin and what reserves must back it. Our guide to GENIUS Act and MiCA rules covers it in detail.

Market structure is the bigger, messier question: for every other token, who is the regulator? If a token is a security, the SEC governs its sale and the venues that trade it. If it is a commodity, the CFTC polices fraud and manipulation, but until recently had no direct authority over spot trading at all. For a decade that ambiguity was settled by lawsuits rather than rules. The CLARITY Act tries to replace case-by-case enforcement with a statute that sorts tokens into categories and assigns each one a regulator.

What the House passed in July 2025

The House approved the CLARITY Act on 17 July 2025 by 294 to 134, with every Republican and dozens of Democrats in favour. According to The Block's explainer, the bill divides digital assets into categories including digital commodities, stablecoins and tokenised securities, with investment contracts still handled under SEC rules. It sets benchmarks for when a network is decentralised enough that its token stops being treated as a security, and treats DeFi protocols as infrastructure rather than intermediaries that must register.

For centralised platforms the House text required federal registration, retail disclosures and segregation of customer funds from company money. One concern raised at the time: decentralised exchanges would not get the same federal pre-emption over state law, leaving them exposed to 50 state regimes.

The Senate's version and the three fights

The Senate split the work between two committees. Agriculture, which oversees the CFTC, advanced its draft in January 2026 on party lines. Banking took longer, stalled for months over stablecoin rewards, then voted 15 to 9 on 14 May 2026 to advance its bill, with Democratic senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks supplying the decisive votes, per The Block. More than 100 amendments had been filed.

Three disputes then dominated the summer.

• Stablecoin rewards. Banks argue that exchanges paying "rewards" on stablecoin balances are offering deposit interest without being banks, and that this will drain community bank deposits. The compromise text bans passive yield paid by issuers and platforms while allowing activity-based incentives, and the final September draft added an 18-month "circuit breaker" the Treasury Secretary could trigger if stablecoins cause substantial deposit outflows. Bank groups said that kicks in too late. Our explainer on the stablecoins and bank deposits debate sets out both sides.
• Ethics. Democrats wanted limits on senior officials, including the President, profiting from crypto ventures. A deal announced in July barred officials and their spouses from issuing or sponsoring digital assets, but left enforcement with the Justice Department. A later draft gave state attorneys general a role, which critics still called unenforceable.
• Developers and DeFi. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, folded into the bill, says non-custodial developers are not money transmitters. Changes to how it protects developers from criminal liability split even the bill's supporters.

The bill did not die over what a token is. It died over who gets to profit from one.

Worked example: the 60-vote arithmetic

Senate procedure means a bill like this needs 60 votes to end debate and proceed. Here is how the numbers looked on 15 September 2026, based on The Block's account of the vote.

1. The tally: 49 yes, 50 no. Senator Thom Tillis voted yes, then switched to no, a procedural move that allows him to file a motion to reconsider. Counting him, the bill had 50 supporters.
2. The gap: 60 minus 50 leaves 10 votes short, almost all of which would have to come from Democrats.
3. The swing bloc: the two Democrats who carried the bill through Banking, Gallego and Alsobrooks, had said they would not vote for it without adequate ethics language. Senator Mark Warner said the provision fell well short.
4. The calendar: even had the Senate passed it, the text differs from the House bill, so it must go back to the House, which was not expected to act until after the 3 November 2026 midterm elections. The day before the vote, TD Cowen put the odds of enactment in 2026 at 25%.

Compare that with the House margin of 294 to 134, or about 69% in favour. The Senate result was roughly 49% of those voting. The policy content was broadly bipartisan; the politics of the moment were not.

Plan B: the agencies move without Congress

The more consequential story of 2026 may be what the regulators did while Congress argued. The SEC, under Chairman Paul Atkins, and the CFTC, under Chairman Michael Selig, who took office in December 2025, announced a joint effort called Project Crypto in January 2026, with Selig directing staff to work on joint codification of an SEC "token taxonomy" for deciding which tokens are securities, The Block reported. In March 2026 the two agencies issued guidance saying most cryptocurrencies are not securities.

Then came concrete rules:

• Listed spot crypto. Following September 2025 joint SEC-CFTC guidance, Bitnomial became the first CFTC-registered exchange to list leveraged spot crypto products in December 2025, per The Block.
• SEC innovation exemption. On 17 September 2026, two days after the Senate vote, the SEC released a five-year exemption that lets "tokenised securities venues" offer onchain trading of certain tokenised stocks without being defined as exchanges, and lets some automated liquidity providers avoid dealer registration. Synthetic instruments are excluded and issuers can block their shares, as The Block detailed.
• CFTC Regulation CTX and CAM. On 5 October 2026 the CFTC launched rulemaking for a federal framework for leveraged and margined retail crypto trading, including a possible "crypto asset market" category of registered exchange, as an alternative to state licensing. It cannot force all spot crypto onto CFTC venues without Congress, according to The Block.

The SEC's July 2026 regulatory agenda also flagged amendments to broker-dealer net capital, customer protection and recordkeeping rules to address crypto assets, plus possible safe harbours for token offerings.

Law versus rulemaking: what each route delivers

That last row is the whole argument for legislation. JPMorgan analysts noted after the vote that agency rules are less durable than statute. A different SEC chair in 2029 could withdraw an exemption or reverse a taxonomy. For anyone building a business on these rules, that is a five-year horizon at best.

What changes for exchanges, tokens and users

Exchanges. US platforms still operate mostly under state money transmitter licences, which our guide to crypto licences explains. The CFTC's proposal offers a federal alternative for leveraged retail products. Without the CLARITY Act, there is no single federal licence for spot trading of non-security tokens.

Token issuers. The March 2026 guidance and the coming SEC taxonomy lower the risk that a widely used, decentralised token is treated as a security. Projects at an early, centralised stage still face securities rules, softened by any safe harbour the SEC finalises.

Tokenisation. The innovation exemption opens a regulated route for trading tokenised shares onchain, a development covered in our piece on real-world asset tokenisation.

Stablecoin holders. The fight over rewards is unresolved in law. Whether a platform can pay you for holding a dollar stablecoin depends on GENIUS Act implementing rules, explained in our guide to GENIUS Act implementation.

Our view: the agencies are delivering most of the practical clarity the industry asked for, faster than Congress could have. What they cannot deliver is permanence, state pre-emption or developer protection. Those three are the real stakes of the bill now.

What to watch next

• 3 November 2026: US midterm elections. The House cannot take up a revised bill before then, and a change in control would reset the negotiation.
• Late 2026: whether Senator Tillis's motion to reconsider produces a second floor vote in the lame-duck session.
• 12 November 2026 onward: EU direct supervision of USDC's reserves begins, a reminder that other jurisdictions are pressing ahead with stablecoin oversight.
• Through 2026-27: final text of CFTC Regulation CTX and CAM, SEC broker-dealer crypto amendments, and any SEC token offering safe harbour.
• 2028: analysts at TD Cowen have warned the CFTC framework may need to be completed before the 2028 election to survive a change of administration.

This article explains legislation and regulation in general terms and is not legal advice.

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