The Senate Banking Committee will hold an executive session on May 14 to consider the CLARITY Act, the cryptocurrency market structure bill. Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks released a compromise on stablecoin yield this week — banning yields equivalent to bank deposits while preserving "bona fide activities" rewards. Coinbase and Circle endorsed the compromise within hours; trade groups are pushing for fast markup.
What's actually been agreed: the yield compromise is committee-level draft language, not law. What that means: the Banking Committee can mark up CLARITY on May 14 with this language; the full Senate then needs to schedule a vote (Senator Scott has said June or July); the House version then needs to reconcile or be re-passed. None of that is automatic. Past crypto bills have died at exactly this stage as floor time went to budget reconciliation, debt ceiling, or other items. The compromise itself is the kind that survives committee but gets tweaked in conference — the "bona fide activities" carve-out is the clause that lawyers and lobbyists will be litigating between now and any signed law. Reporting this as "crypto regulation has arrived" is at least three procedural steps ahead of where we actually are.
If you operate a stablecoin product or rewards program, start scenario-planning the "buy and use" transaction-cap model now — but don't restructure until at least the conference report. The current language will move.