The passage of the 2025 Digital Asset Market Clarity Act has been on a difficult journey since early 2026. However, in a recent speech at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Senator Cynthia Lummis announced that May would be the new deadline for the passage.
Senator Lummis said,
“We are going to mark up the Clarity Act in May. We are going to get it to the finish line.”
Does May look like a realistic timeline?
The earliest the Senate Banking Committee could mark up the bill is 11 May as the Senate will be going into a week-long recess beginning on 30 April. This means only a few days are left to pass the bill as per the new deadline.
However, the bill needs to pass the Senate Banking Committee, where it has been stalled since January, in order to proceed to this point. Given that the April deal was recently canceled, the May deadline now appears unrealistic.
However, Lummis thinks the law is a one-stop shop for “developers, validators, and node operators.” Hence, if approved, the Act would serve as “a safe harbor” to keep innovations rooted in the United States.
Delay is guaranteed
On the contrary, Senator Thomas Tillis (R-N.C), a key negotiator leading the stablecoin yield deal between the crypto and banking industries, believes otherwise. According to the Senator,
It is very important for me not to accelerate things, to hear everybody, and give them a rational basis for what we do accept.
In a separate exchange with Politico, Tillis reiterated the same sentiment. He said,
There has to be ethics language in the bill before it leaves the Senate, or I’ll go from one of the people working on negotiating it to voting against it.
Remarking on the same, Nick Puckrin, an ex-Goldman Sachs professional, took to X and claimed,
We always knew the Democrats wanted ethics provisions but now a Republican is joining them.
This coincided with Polymarket’s 2026 CLARITY Act passage odds declining by 20% to 45%. Put simply, it is clear that the CLARITY Act is currently teetering on thin ice.
Final Summary
- With Senator Lummis setting May as the new deadline, the Senate Banking Committee could mark up the bill as early as 11 May.
- Senator Thomas Tillis, on the other hand, believes that acceleration is not the answer to the passage of the CLARITY Act.