Faryar Shirzad told Fox Business that the Senate Banking Committee could mark up the bill this month, with a floor vote following in May — a timeline the committee's own chairman has yet to confirm.
Coinbase's chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, told Fox Business on Thursday that he expects the Senate Banking Committee to mark up the CLARITY Act as early as this month, with a full Senate floor vote possible in May. The bill, which would create the first comprehensive federal framework for classifying and regulating digital assets, passed the House on 17 July 2025 with 294 votes in favour — including 78 Democrats — and has been stuck in the Senate ever since.
The timeline Shirzad outlined is optimistic. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott has not announced a markup date. A January session was postponed on the day it was scheduled to begin, after disagreements over stablecoin yield provisions torpedoed what was supposed to be a formality. Nine months of negotiations later, the same question — whether holders of regulated stablecoins should be able to earn passive yield — remains the bill's central obstacle.
The contours of a compromise exist. Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks, the lead Republican and Democratic negotiators respectively, have circulated draft language that would prohibit passive yield from simply holding stablecoins while allowing rewards tied to payments, transfers or platform usage. The White House's Council of Economic Advisers published an academic review finding no evidence that stablecoin rewards cause deposit flight — a direct rebuttal to the banking lobby's principal objection. Patrick Witt, the White House's top crypto adviser, confirmed on 14 April that the remaining sticking points should be easier to clear now that the yield question has a working framework.
But the crypto industry itself nearly killed the bill earlier this year. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong twice withdrew his support in January over provisions he considered too restrictive, contributing to the markup's collapse. He publicly re-endorsed the CLARITY Act on 9 April, one day after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent published a Wall Street Journal op-ed urging immediate passage. Armstrong's reversal removed a significant obstacle — Coinbase is the most politically active company in digital assets, having spent more than $100 million on crypto-related political campaigns in the 2024 election cycle — but it also demonstrated how fragile the coalition behind the bill remains.
The CLARITY Act is not a stablecoin bill; the GENIUS Act, which passed the Senate separately, handles stablecoins. The CLARITY Act's core purpose is to establish which digital assets are securities and which are commodities, assigning regulatory authority between the SEC and the CFTC accordingly. The SEC has since told self-custody wallet providers they don't need broker-dealer licences and submitted a safe harbour proposal for crypto fundraising that is currently at the White House for review. Those measures are stopgaps; without the CLARITY Act, they rest on staff guidance that future administrations can reverse.
Senator Bernie Moreno has been blunt about the deadline. If the bill does not reach the Senate floor by May, it almost certainly won't move this Congress. The legislative calendar compresses rapidly after Memorial Day; budget reconciliation, appropriations and midterm-year politics consume the remaining bandwidth. The CLARITY Act passed the House with a 160-vote margin. Whether the Senate can match that depends on whether Tim Scott believes the yield compromise will hold under a floor vote — and whether the banking industry's opposition, which has been fierce, can be absorbed without losing moderate Democrats.
The bipartisan PARITY Act, reintroduced last month, would address crypto tax treatment separately; its sponsors are hoping to attach it to the CLARITY Act as an amendment during markup. That adds another variable to an already overloaded negotiation.
Shirzad's prediction may prove correct. The political infrastructure is more favourable than at any point since the bill left the House: a supportive White House, an SEC chairman who wants to formalise the framework through regulation, and a banking industry that, while opposed to yield, is not opposed to market structure clarity. The bill's prospects have never been better. In Washington, that still does not mean they are good.
