A bill important to cryptocurrency companies has passed a key Senate committee. What about stocks?

On Ma. 14, the U.S. crypto industry achieved an important victory in the Senate: the banking committee of the upper chamber, after months of debate, approved the Clarity Act bill, which defines the legal status of digital assets, CNBC reports. Bloomberg calls this document historic. It will now be sent to the full Senate for consideration and then to the House of Representatives, but opposition is still high.

Shares of cryptocurrency companies rose in trading on Ma 14: quotes of Coinbase exchange, the largest public holder of bitcoin Strategy and trading platform Robinhood added about 5%. Jack Dorsey's company Block ended the session up 2.5%. The price of bitcoin rose by 2%.

The Clarity Act would cement the status of the primary regulator for much of the crypto market to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), while the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would retain oversight authority over digital assets that fall under the definition of securities.

The bill would require all digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers to be treated as financial institutions, Reuters notes. This would oblige them to comply with anti-money laundering, customer identification and due diligence requirements.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott said the Clarity Act should bring the crypto market "out of the gray area" and create "clear rules of the game" for the industry instead of uncertainty. "The last couple months have been like cryptocurrency hell," CNBC quoted Senator Mark Warner, who worked on the documents, as saying. - I'm in cryptocurrency purgatory now, but I really expect to make it to the end," he added.

One of the main subjects of debate was the so-called staking - whether cryptocurrency exchanges will be able to offer rewards to customers for storing stablecoins, i.e. tokens pegged to the dollar. The previous attempt to bring the bill to a committee vote failed after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong withdrew his support because of restrictions on such rewards, Bloomberg recalls. Banks fear that allowing stacking could lead to an exodus of deposits from the traditional financial system and reduce their lending capacity, the agency explains. The latest version of the bill allows cryptocurrency companies to offer rewards only for the use of stablecoins in transactions, but prohibits schemes resembling bank deposits.

Another tense issue on which no agreement can be reached is a rule designed to limit the ability of government officials to profit from businesses related to cryptocurrencies. It is being pushed by some Democrats, Bloomberg writes. These ethical claims are largely directed against US President Donald Trump, whose family fortune has grown significantly thanks to crypto projects and "memcoins", the agency points out.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor