Table of contents
Status as of 18 September 2026
- Where it stands: stalled in the Senate. The cloture vote on the motion to proceed failed 49-50 on 15 September 2026; 60 votes were needed.
- Who voted no: every Democrat, joined by four Republicans, Susan Collins (ME), Josh Hawley (MO), Jerry Moran (KS) and Thom Tillis (NC).
- Next step: the failed vote does not kill the bill. Senate leaders can revise the text and file for cloture again, but no date has been set, and the November midterms shorten the calendar. Without a text that resolves the DeFi, ethics and regulatory-authority disputes, passage in 2026 is unlikely.
- Has it passed? No. The House passed H.R. 3633 on 17 July 2025 (294-134); the Senate has not passed it.
The CLARITY Act, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, H.R. 3633, is the US bill that would decide which digital assets are commodities overseen by the CFTC and which are securities overseen by the SEC, and set registration, disclosure and customer-protection rules for exchanges, brokers and dealers. It passed the House in July 2025 and failed a Senate procedural vote on 15 September 2026.
Will the CLARITY Act pass?
Not in its current form. Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed before the August recess, setting up the 15 September vote; it fell eleven votes short of the 60 needed. The Senate has been working from its own market-structure text rather than the House bill, and the disputes that pushed the vote from August into September are still open: how decentralised a project must be to escape securities treatment, ethics rules for officials holding digital assets, the treatment of DeFi front-ends, and how the bill interacts with the stablecoin regime already enacted under the GENIUS Act. A second attempt needs a text that moves at least eleven senators.
What changes for crypto KYC and AML if it passes
- Registered intermediaries get explicit Bank Secrecy Act obligations. Exchanges, brokers and dealers registering with the CFTC or SEC would be treated as financial institutions for anti-money-laundering purposes: a written AML programme, customer identification at onboarding, sanctions screening and suspicious-activity reporting, the duties banks already carry.
- Customer-asset segregation and disclosure. Platforms would have to segregate customer assets and disclose conflicts, which brings KYC records into the audit trail examiners review.
- DeFi front-ends and developers. The treatment of non-custodial software is the contested part; whatever survives decides whether decentralised applications need identity gating at all. Zyphe covers the privacy-preserving options in KYC for DeFi protocols and zero-knowledge KYC.
Until federal law changes, US-facing exchanges remain money services businesses under FinCEN rules: see what an MSB is and how to register as an MSB. For the obligations step by step, read CLARITY Act KYC and AML requirements.
What a US-facing exchange must run today, whatever happens to the bill, is on the KYC for crypto page: identity verification, screening and monitoring under FinCEN’s MSB rules, structured so that CLARITY Act obligations would add reporting duties rather than a rebuild.
Timeline
- 15 Sep 2026: Senate cloture vote on the motion to proceed fails, 49-50.
- Aug 2026: Majority Leader Thune files cloture before the August recess; the vote is set for 15 September.
- 17 Jul 2025: House passes H.R. 3633, 294-134.
- 10 Jun 2025: House Financial Services and Agriculture Committees report the bill.
- 29 May 2025: Bill introduced.
Changelog
- 18 Sep 2026: status block, timeline and FAQ added after the 15 September Senate vote. This entry is updated on every vote.
Written by Michelangelo Frigo (Co-Founder at Zyphe) Reviewed September 18, 2026 Michelangelo Frigo is a privacy and identity infrastructure expert and co-founder of Zyphe.