The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act passed the House of Representatives on Thursday afternoon by a 294-134 vote, with notable bipartisan support during what congressional leadership had branded "Crypto Week." The bill — H.R. 3633 — defines when a digital asset is a security versus a commodity, splits primary supervisory authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and codifies a "Mature Blockchain Test" that classifies tokens as digital commodities once no single entity controls more than 20 percent of supply or governance.
The bill is the product of nearly two years of negotiation. An earlier version, the FIT21 Act, passed the House in 2024 by a 279-136 margin but failed to advance in the Senate before the prior Congress adjourned. The redrafted version that became the CLARITY Act tightens the bright-line tests around when a token transitions from security treatment to commodity treatment, broadens the CFTC's jurisdictional perimeter for spot-market oversight, and adds new protections for non-custodial software developers — language that was negotiated in part to address the chilling effect of recent enforcement actions against open-source contributors.
The vote count is the headline indicator of how the political center has shifted. The 294 yes votes included 78 Democrats — a meaningfully larger Democratic share than supported FIT21 last year. Among the no votes, opposition was concentrated among progressive members who argued that the bill weakens existing securities-law investor protections, particularly the Howey-test standard for what constitutes an investment contract. House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill described the legislation on the floor as "a fundamental reset of the regulatory environment that has hung over American digital asset firms for half a decade."
Industry reaction was uniformly supportive among the major U.S. crypto firms. The Chamber of Digital Commerce, Coin Center, and the Blockchain Association each released statements endorsing the bill within hours of its passage. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said in a written statement that the framework "removes the principal source of regulatory ambiguity that has slowed product innovation at U.S.-domiciled firms for years." Critics from consumer-protection advocacy groups — including Better Markets and Americans for Financial Reform — argued that the 20 percent threshold for commodity classification is "too easily gamed" and that the bill effectively narrows SEC jurisdiction over the bulk of the existing token universe.
The bill addresses head-on the "regulation by enforcement" criticism that defined the SEC's posture toward crypto under the Biden administration. Under the proposed framework, SEC and CFTC would operate under explicit jurisdictional rules rather than competing case-by-case interpretations. Crypto exchanges and brokers would gain a clearer compliance pathway to offer most major tokens, and the SEC's authority to bring enforcement actions on the theory that essentially all token offerings are unregistered securities would be substantially curtailed. Whether the practical effect is to broaden or narrow the regulatory perimeter depends on which set of tokens are within or outside the 20 percent test in any given quarter.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where it must clear two committees before reaching the full Senate floor: Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. Senate timing remains uncertain. Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott has publicly committed to advancing comprehensive crypto legislation but has not yet announced a markup date for the CLARITY Act version. Industry lobbyists are now turning their attention to the Senate calendar; with the GENIUS Act on the President's desk and bipartisan momentum behind the broader market-structure framework, optimism about a Senate path is meaningfully higher than it was at the same point last year.