Senate’s Crypto Market Structure Bill Is Moving Again, But the Hard Part Isn’t Over

Something may actually be happening in Washington on crypto. After a January markup collapsed, a March 1 White House deadline quietly passed without a deal, and weeks of closed-door talks went largely nowhere in public.

Meanwhile, a reporter covering the White House indicated on March 2 that the CLARITY Act‘s final text is “very close,” and that the Senate Banking Committee is now targeting a markup in the second half of March.

Whether that holds is anyone’s guess. This bill has missed so many internal deadlines that even people inside the process appear reluctant to treat any timeline as firm. 

Still, the Polymarket odds of the CLARITY Act being signed into law in 2026 has now climbed to 77% on Tuesday, up roughly 13 points in a week.

Kalshi paints a more cautious picture: traders there put the probability of passage before April at just 6%, before May at 22%, before June at 41%. Both markets may be right in their own way, the bill seems likely to pass eventually, but the calendar is not cooperating.

The Fight Nobody Has Solved Yet

The core dispute here isn’t really about market structure. It’s the stablecoins. Specifically, it’s about whether firms like Coinbase should be allowed to pay customers for holding dollar-pegged tokens, rewards programs, yield-sharing arrangements, and similar products that blur the line between a stablecoin and a savings account.

Banks hate this. Their argument, which is not without merit, is that interest-bearing stablecoins would drain deposits from traditional savings products without being subject to the same consumer protection rules or reserve requirements.

Crypto firms counter that restricting yield would drive product development offshore and punish American users. As of early March, neither side has moved enough to close the gap.

One banking source told Crypto In America that the stablecoin yield issue is currently what’s blocking consensus, though the same source said negotiators should not read too much into the missed March 1 deadline. Talks are apparently still ongoing, text is still being exchanged.

The White House reportedly prefers to resolve the stablecoin yield issue through agency rulemaking rather than hard legislative language, which may be a way of kicking the can, or may be the only path to a compromise both sides can live with. 

Meanwhile, DeFi has also emerged as a serious fault line. Crypto advocates want broad protections for open-source developers, arguing that code itself should not be treated as a regulated financial intermediary.

Democrats have raised concerns about money laundering, sanctions evasion, and national security risks if those safeguards are written too loosely. It’s a harder problem to finesse than stablecoin yield, and it has received far less public attention.

Three Bills, One Clock

Even if the Senate Banking Committee gets its markup done this month, there’s still a long road ahead. The Senate Agriculture Committee’s companion legislation, the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act, cleared committee on January 29. 

That bill would then need to be reconciled with the Senate Banking version, which would then need to be reconciled with the House’s CLARITY Act, which passed 294–134 last July. That’s three moving pieces, each with its own language and its own stakeholders.

Industry participants have quietly flagged April as a soft deadline for negotiations to break through, with July as the outer limit before midterm-cycle politics start consuming Senate floor time. 

JPMorgan analysts have said a clear regulatory framework could move institutional investors, pension funds, insurers, asset managers, from exploratory allocations into higher-conviction positions. That’s the structural argument for getting this done. 

The counter-argument, which Democrats including Cory Booker have made repeatedly, is that no market structure bill should move without ethics provisions that prevent elected officials from financially benefiting from crypto holdings while in office.

That amendment failed in January along party lines, but it appears unlikely to stay off the table entirely. Complicating all of this is money.

Fairshake, the crypto industry’s main super PAC network, disclosed $193 million in cash heading into the November 2026 midterms, including close to $75 million in fresh contributions from Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz. That kind of spending tends to focus legislative minds.