The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY Act) is the US House-side market-structure bill that allocates jurisdiction over digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). H.R. 3633 passed the House on 17 July 2025 by a 294-134 bipartisan vote (Morgan Lewis CLARITY Act note). The bill creates a "digital commodity" category for assets tied to a "mature blockchain system," routes spot trading and intermediary registration to the CFTC, and preserves SEC jurisdiction over investment-contract sales of those assets. The Senate has not adopted the House text; companion drafts from the Banking and Agriculture committees remain in negotiation through early 2026 (Davis Wright Tremaine analysis). For tokenisation operators, CLARITY is the load-bearing US text on whether a tokenised asset is a security, a commodity, or something else, and which agency licenses the platforms that distribute it.
Scope
The Act covers digital assets that are not payment stablecoins (which sit under the us genius act perimeter) and not traditional securities. The new "digital commodity" category captures digital assets intrinsically linked to a blockchain system whose value derives from the use of that system. The "mature blockchain system" test is the gating definition: a system is mature when it is not controlled by any person or group of persons under common control, evaluated against operational, governance, and economic factors. Until a network meets the maturity test, transactions in its native asset can fall under SEC investment-contract jurisdiction (Morgan Lewis CLARITY Act note).
Tokenised representations of off-chain real-world commodities (agricultural, energy, precious metals) sit outside the digital-commodity perimeter and remain under the existing CFTC commodity framework. Tokenised securities continue under the SEC. Stablecoins are carved out and routed to GENIUS.
Mechanics
Once a network reaches mature-blockchain status, the digital commodity is supervised by the CFTC for spot-market activity. The Act creates three CFTC registration categories: digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers (Morgan Lewis CLARITY Act note). Each has its own conduct, capital, custody, and disclosure obligations modelled on the futures-market framework. The Act also establishes a provisional registration system for existing intermediaries while final CFTC rules are written.
The SEC retains jurisdiction over investment-contract sales of digital assets. A primary issuance meeting the Howey test continues to be a securities offering; CLARITY provides a path for secondary-market trading to migrate to CFTC oversight once the underlying network matures. The Act includes a self-certification mechanism for maturity determinations, with the SEC retaining the ability to object within a defined review window.
Platform-level custody rules require client digital assets to be held in trust, with disclosure of custody arrangements and segregation rules. The Act preserves the Bank Secrecy Act framework for digital-asset intermediaries.
Status
Pending. The House passed H.R. 3633 on 17 July 2025 with bipartisan support. The Senate has produced two parallel discussion drafts: the Senate Banking Committee under Chairman Tim Scott and senators Cynthia Lummis, Bill Hagerty, and Bernie Moreno released the Responsible Financial Innovation Act of 2025; the Senate Agriculture Committee under senators John Boozman and Cory Booker released a separate bipartisan crypto market structure discussion draft on 10 November 2025 (Davis Wright Tremaine analysis). The two drafts diverge on the boundary between SEC and CFTC jurisdiction and on how aggressively to constrain the "mature blockchain" test. Reconciliation between the Senate drafts and reconciliation with the House text remain outstanding as of late April 2026.
Implications for tokenisation
For tokenised securities and tokenised funds, CLARITY does not change the analysis: those instruments stay under SEC jurisdiction. The bill is most consequential for platforms distributing a mix of native-blockchain assets and tokenised real-world assets, where venue licensing has been ambiguous since the FTX and Coinbase enforcement cycles. Under CLARITY, the platform operator gets a clear route: register as a digital-commodity exchange with the CFTC for the digital-commodity inventory, register as an Alternative Trading System or broker-dealer with the SEC for the security-token inventory, and run the two registrations in parallel.
The mature-blockchain test is where most operator-level risk sits. A network that fails the test pulls its native asset into SEC jurisdiction, so a registered platform cannot list it as a digital commodity. Issuers and protocol developers need to design for the maturity factors from inception rather than treating decentralisation as emergent. That has knock-on effects for token distributions, founder-equity structures, and governance designs.
For agentic commerce, CLARITY does not directly address AI agents holding digital commodities, but the platform-level custody and registration framework is the perimeter any agent-mediated trading must clear. An agent buying a tokenised commodity on a CFTC-registered exchange is structurally easier to accommodate than an agent operating across the SEC-CFTC boundary on the same wallet.
Open questions
- Whether the Senate will adopt a unified text and whether that text preserves the CLARITY Act's mature-blockchain framing or replaces it with a more prescriptive decentralisation test.
- How the SEC objection mechanism on maturity determinations will operate in practice, particularly for networks where the agency disagrees with the developer's self-certification.
- Treatment of decentralised finance protocols without an identifiable operator, which neither CLARITY nor the Senate drafts have fully resolved.
- Interaction with the us genius act for venues distributing both stablecoins and digital commodities, particularly on capital and segregation overlay obligations.