Senate GOP drops 635-page CLARITY Act “final offer” ahead of Tuesday procedural vote
The rewrite adds Trump-backed crypto ethics bans and a time-limited Treasury lever on stablecoin rewards.
Senate Republicans released a 635-page revised CLARITY Act text described as a “final offer” just two days before a Tuesday 2:15pm ET procedural vote that will decide whether the bill can advance toward floor consideration. The rewrite adds Trump-backed ethics restrictions for federal officials, expands Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act protections, and inserts a conditional Treasury authority to restrict stablecoin rewards.
Senate Republicans released a revised, 635-page CLARITY Act text on Sunday, framing it as a “final offer” meant to bring Democrats onside ahead of a scheduled Tuesday 2:15pm ET procedural vote. The text was released by Sen. Cynthia Lummis alongside Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman and Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott.
The timing is the point. A procedural vote is the Senate’s gatekeeping step that determines whether a bill can move forward in the process toward full floor consideration, which is where amendments, debate time, and the path to a final vote become real rather than theoretical. For policy-sensitive crypto positioning, that makes Tuesday’s 2:15pm ET vote the near-term binary: either the bill clears the hurdle and becomes a live floor calendar risk, or it stalls and the “final offer” framing turns into a messaging exercise.
Lummis cast the rewrite as the product of “a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations,” and said the text includes 126 changes made at the request of Democrats. A Republican aide described the package as a final offer to Democrats.
What the Rewrite Adds: Trump-Backed Crypto Ethics Bans, Enforcement, and Penalties
The most politically loaded addition is an ethics package tied directly to digital assets, which Lummis said had been agreed to by President Donald Trump. “After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready,” Lummis said. “President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in US history.”
Mechanically, the revised text would restrict federally elected officials, judges, and their spouses from issuing, sponsoring, or holding “significant financial interests” in digital assets. It also builds an enforcement lane outside Washington by giving state attorneys general authority to enforce the bans, and it reaches into market plumbing by targeting exchanges that list assets in violation of those restrictions.
The compliance teeth are explicit. Covered individuals would have to divest “significant financial interests” or place them into a qualified blind trust. Civil penalties are set at up to $500,000 or 20% of the amount received in the prohibited transaction, whichever is greater.
The effective-date design matters as much as the headline restriction. The ethics provisions would take effect 360 days after enactment, or sooner if implementing regulations are finalized, which means the market impact is less about immediate forced selling and more about how quickly definitions and enforcement expectations harden around “significant financial interests.”
Stablecoin Rewards and BRCA Tweaks Put Market Structure Back in Focus
The rewrite also re-centers market structure by adding a conditional, time-limited Treasury lever over stablecoin rewards. Under the text, the Treasury Secretary would be required to introduce rules restricting stablecoin rewards if they determine that community banks are losing deposits “on a substantial scale.” That authority would sunset 18 months after the bill becomes law.
For stablecoin issuers, exchanges, and DeFi venues that route stablecoin incentives to users, the key detail is that the trigger is not automatic and the restriction is not permanent. The open question is practical: what evidence would satisfy the “substantial scale” deposit-loss determination, and what form the resulting restrictions would take.
The revised text also updates the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) in a way that directly touches U.S.-facing infrastructure operators. It retains protections against treating developers as money transmitters or financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act, and it extends those protections to miners and validators, which had been excluded. The rewrite also removes references to 18 U.S.C. § 1960, the federal prohibition on unlicensed money transmitting businesses.
Other changes in the package would strengthen safeguards around affiliate trading and conflicts of interest at digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers, and clarify how consumer protection laws apply.
The next 48 hours are where this either becomes a tradable policy catalyst or a contained rewrite. Tuesday’s 2:15pm ET procedural vote is the immediate decision point, and any post-vote statements that indicate whether the bill can advance toward floor consideration will matter more than the “final offer” label.
Beyond the vote itself, the market will be watching for public whip counts or other signals of Democratic support after the revised text’s release, because the rewrite is explicitly pitched as a bipartisan bridge. Implementation detail is the other pressure point: the bill’s ethics restrictions hinge on how “significant financial interests” is defined and enforced, and that ambiguity is where compliance-sensitive firms tend to price risk early.
Polymarket odds for the CLARITY Act passing this year reached 35% on Monday, the highest level since late July, making it a useful sentiment gauge for whether Tuesday confirms or fades the move.
My Read: The Bill’s “Final Offer” Framing Is a Sentiment Catalyst—But Tuesday Decides the Trade
The “final offer” framing is being treated like progress, and the 35% Polymarket print fits that, but it is still a sub-50 probability signal and it can reverse quickly if the procedural vote does not cleanly advance the bill toward floor consideration. The threshold that matters is not whether the text is longer or tougher, it is whether the Senate can actually move it onto a floor track where amendments and coalition math become visible.
The ethics package looks designed to compress political friction by putting explicit bans, state attorney general enforcement, and large civil penalties on paper, while the BRCA expansion to miners and validators is a direct attempt to narrow Bank Secrecy Act money-transmitter exposure for core network participants. If Tuesday clears the procedural hurdle and Democratic support starts to show up in public counts, the setup starts to look structural rather than narrative-driven, because the bill would be moving from draft language to an actual floor process with deadlines and votes.
