The Senate Agriculture Committee released its draft crypto market structure legislation on Monday, bringing the body a necessary step closer to advancing its response to the House Clarity Act legislation to define how exactly the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can monitor spot market trading.
The bill, which still includes parentheses denoting sections where lawmakers have yet to fully agree on the details, marks a major step toward the government delineating where the CFTC’s jurisdiction ends and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s begins — a key question only Congress can answer as those federal agencies step up their own efforts to outlaw encryption. crypto-related services in the United States
Still, a bill is still just one step down the legislative path, and the Senate’s bandwidth has been narrowed by other pressing matters — notably the budget dispute that currently has the federal government shut down.
Senate staffers worked on the bill through the weekend, two people familiar with the situation told CoinDesk, even as lawmakers worked on a deal to end the ongoing US government shutdown. The latter deal cleared a procedural hurdle late Sunday, although the Senate — and House of Representatives — have yet to vote on the actual continuing resolution to fund the government.
The draft released Monday, led by committee chairman John Boozeman and one of the panel’s senior Democrats, Cory Booker, defines terms like “blockchain” and how those terms will apply under the Commodity Exchange Act; it directs the CFTC to engage in joint rulemaking with the SEC to address everything from portfolio margining of securities to how the agencies will supervise intermediaries.
Some of the sections in parentheses contain definitions for how this bill may interact with other laws. One section said the “minority view” — referring to Democrats here — is that lawmakers don’t think the Agriculture Committee has enough jurisdiction to consider part of the bill, but want to work with the Banking Committee to craft it.
Another bracketed section would require the CFTC to have at least two commissioners with the minority party consult on their composition. The CFTC is currently led by a single acting chair, Caroline Pham. President Donald Trump has nominated current SEC crypto task force adviser Mike Selig to take over as chairman, but he has not nominated any other commissioners.
In a statement, DeFi Education Fund CEO Amanda Tuminelli said, “We hope that the section open to DeFi will be filled with robust developer protections that clearly separate centralized intermediaries from software developers without custody and control over other people’s money.”
The Agriculture Committee oversees the CFTC, and the Senate Banking Committee, which has already released several drafts of its own, oversees the SEC. Both committees must advance their respective bills out of committee.
Before then, however, there has been considerable grumbling among lawmakers to just move on to the markup stage — a formal process in which bills are opened to amendments before being put to a final vote in committee. Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee have also struggled with dissent over the bill’s readiness within their own ranks, including from a critical Senator John Kennedy.
And while a large contingent of Democrats are eager to forge common ground and pass a bill, others, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have raised ongoing objections about the risks posed by the crypto industry and the conflict of interest presented by President Donald Trump’s personal stake in the sector.
The conventional wisdom among crypto lobbyists and leading lawmakers for how quickly the market structure effort could clear the Senate has shifted numerous times, from the August deadline first set by Trump to September, then this month, and more recently the end of the year — if at all.
Negotiations have begun and were recently derailed for a time by a controversial set of proposals that industry insiders said would have threatened the core elements of decentralized finance (DeFi). But recently, meetings between crypto executives and key lawmakers got the talks back on track.
It could still take months for the bills to move through committees and reach the Senate floor for a vote, said Ron Hammond, director of policy and advocacy at Wintermute.
“It is very possible that one or both committees will vote their respective versions of the bill before the end of the year,” he said. “But the next step will be combining the bills and navigating the politics/various stakeholders.”
A Senate vote may not happen until the first quarter of 2026, “but a lot has to happen before that,” he said.
