Over 120 organizations have collectively written to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, urging the acceleration of the review and marking process for the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act
The Blockchain Association, along with the Crypto Council for Innovation (CCI) and over 120 organizations including Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, and Circle, have collectively written to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, urging the acceleration of the review and marking process for the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act. They call for the establishment of a unified market structure framework for the U.S. digital asset market to clarify regulatory responsibilities, enhance investor protection, and solidify the U.S.'s leading position in financial innovation. The joint letter points out that relying solely on the SEC and CFTC's enforcement actions and case guidance does not provide businesses with a predictable long-term compliance path, but rather exacerbates the uncertainty of "enforcement over regulation," weakening incentives for businesses to operate or remain in the U.S.
Previously, the CLARITY Act, promoted by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, aimed to resolve the long-standing jurisdictional disputes between the SEC and CFTC by clarifying the standards for defining crypto assets as either "securities" or "commodities." It seeks to establish unified federal rules for stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized technologies, and is viewed as a core blueprint for U.S. digital asset market structure legislation. However, the bill has faced simultaneous pressure from traditional banking and some crypto companies on issues such as yield-bearing stablecoins, bank deposit alternatives, and yield distribution mechanisms, leading the Senate Banking Committee to repeatedly postpone key marking meetings, causing delays in this process, which the industry views as a "window of legislative opportunity."
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
This joint letter is significant not just for reiterating the call for legislation, but for the industry’s first unified acknowledgment before the Senate Banking Committee that without a market structure bill, the default path for the U.S. crypto industry is "capital, teams, and licenses flowing out." In recent years, crypto companies have been accustomed to a "patchwork survival" between SEC lawsuits and exemption applications; now, the leading institutions speaking out elevates the issue from "individual projects facing enforcement" to "the national choice of the entire industry chain." This transforms whether Congress will advance CLARITY into a political question of "whether the U.S. can retain pricing power over the next generation of financial infrastructure."
From a regulatory structure perspective, the CLARITY Act attempts to definitively delineate the long-ambiguous "securities vs. commodities" line, placing most homogeneous digital assets and mature public chains under CFTC regulation, while retaining SEC jurisdiction over "investment contracts" only in specific circumstances. This effectively establishes a dual-track framework for the U.S. digital asset market akin to "commodity futures + special securities." For businesses, this "classification first, then regulation" approach significantly reduces compliance uncertainty; for regulatory agencies, it shifts from competing for cases and fines to cooperating under a unified classification table—this is the long-term institutional arrangement the industry hopes to secure through CLARITY.
The joint letter repeatedly emphasizes stablecoins and tokenized assets, directly naming the conflict of interest between the banking and crypto industries: banks are concerned that yield-bearing stablecoins will structurally replace deposits, while crypto companies view stablecoin interest and yield as a core part of their business model. CLARITY has been unable to balance this, leading to ongoing conflicts of interest that slow down the entire market structure legislative process. In other words, the current stalemate is not a technical issue, but a distribution struggle over "who will take the digital dollar premium"—whether it will continue to be monopolized by licensed banks or shared by a new generation of stablecoin issuers and on-chain infrastructure.
From a global perspective, this letter is a clear warning of "regulatory arbitrage migration": if the U.S. continues to substitute enforcement for rules, while jurisdictions like the EU, Singapore, and the UAE provide clear paths with MiCA, virtual asset licenses, and clearing frameworks, high-growth businesses, compliant models, and jobs will rhythmically migrate out, and regions like Hong Kong may gain relative advantages in tokenization and trading infrastructure. The CLARITY Act aims to pull the U.S. back from a state of "passively watching innovation go overseas" to a position where it can use a unified framework to "screen, tame, and tax" this wave of innovation—if the current window is missed, the next reconstruction may have to wait until global standards are already established elsewhere.