【AI前沿】The crypto Clarity Act returns to the Senate this week. The banks are already trying to kill it.

ColumnPolicyTechThe crypto Clarity Act returns to the Senate this week. The banks are already trying to kill it.Can the stablecoin bill get passed before the Republicans lose Congress?Can the stablecoin bill get passed before the Republicans lose Congress?byTina NguyenMay 13, 2026, 7:19 PM UTCLinkShareGiftIllustration by The Verge | Photo via Getty ImagesTina Nguyenis a Senior Reporter for The Verge and author ofRegulator, covering the second Trump administration, political influencers, tech lobbying and Big Tech vs. Big Government.Hello and welcome toRegulator, the newsletter forVergesubscribers that goes into tech shenanigans that take place in the backrooms of Washington. Really, it sometimesdoesfeel like the online seriesThe Backrooms:a parallel universe with no internal logic, evil corporations lurking in the background, and mind-rending eldritch horrors around every corner. (Not a subscriber yet?Sign up here today. Have any tips about mind-rending eldritch horrors lurking in DC? Send that intel to me [email protected].)Speaking of liminal spaces and endless hallways that drive their inhabitants insane: Today, we’re going to Capitol Hill, where the Senate is, at long last, finally revisiting the crypto market structure bill known as the Clarity Act. And it is, indeed, driving everyone insane.On Sunday, as the crypto industry was about to take victory laps for getting the Clarity Act back to the Senate, the American Bankers Association, one of the largest financial industry interest groups in the country, sent out an email that immediately ruined their Mother’s Day. Apologizing to all the moms he’d messaged,Rob Nichols, the president and CEO of the ABA,begged the CEOs on the email, from Wall Street to local community banks, to drop everything and start contacting their Senators ASAP — “Please encourage your employees to do the same” — because the Clarity Act posed an existential threat to their industry. “The current version of the legislation, although improved from an earlier version, still does not adequately prevent crypto companies from offering interest-like rewards on payment stablecoins,” wrote Nichols, warning that if the “loophole” was not closed, customers would be incentivized to move their cash holdings into stablecoins, leading to a bank deposit flight that would severely undermine banks.Rarely does one see Wall Street panic this much over pending legislation, but the Clarity Act, which is slated to return to the Senate Banking Committee for markup on Thursday, does pose a meaningful threat to traditional finance — or at least, the tradition of “holding money in bank accounts that pay interest to customers.” This is not a regular bill that hammers out finer details addressing a preexisting issue in a regulated industry. This is the marketstructurebill — i.e., the comprehensive law that will instruct the market on how stablecoins, or digital tokens pegged to the value of $1 USD, will be legally regulated. In fact, it’s so consequential to the future of crypto that back in January, just before the Senate Banking Committee began debate over the bill’s draft, Coinbase, the largest US company in the industry,abruptly announced that it would not support the versionas it existed, claiming that the banks had rewritten it in a way that would harm crypto in the long term and kicking off months of furious negotiations over the bill’s language. (As an industry watcher pointed out to me at the time, one cannot pass a crypto market structure bill in the United States without the support of the largest crypto company in the country.)The upside for the crypto industry is that they all seem to be on the same page now. After months of negotiations held at the White House, organized byformer special adviser on AI and cryptoDavid Sacksand his administration underlings, Coinbase reached a compromise with the other digital asset companies and the major financial institutions represented in the meetings. “The word ‘compromise’ is etymologically very accurate,” saidVassilis Tziokas, the vice president of growth at the blockchain technology company Matter Labs, who was not in negotiations but hasanalyzed all 300-plus pages of the current bill. As the language currently stands, the bill does not allow stablecoins to offer cash interest yields — but it doesn’tpreventthem from offering yields, either. It’s enough of a legal window for crypto companies to offer activity-based rewards on transactions, similar to how credit card points can be redeemed for things like flights. “The current wording on the Clarity Act is perfect for the legal industry, because once Clarity becomes a law, it depends on lawyers to interpret what ‘activity based rewards’ means,” Tziokas noted.The creative wording seems to have made everyone in the room notunhappy — especially since the administration has made it clear that passing a crypto market structure bill is a top priority for them, demanding that the bill end up on Trump’