Republican Senators have released the final text for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, with the new draft adding ethics language and protections for banks against deposit flight.

The Clarity Act, which passed the US House of Representatives in July 2025, is intended to set out a regulatory framework for digital assets including treating commodity exchanges as financial institutions and grant the Commodity Futures Trading Commission primary regulatory oversight over cryptocurrencies.

In August, the Senate delayed its vote on the bill that would make the act law to September, amid an ongoing dispute over its wording. Senators from both sides of the aisle, as well as banking institutions, have argued that the Clarity Act could destabilise the banking sector.

A specific point of contention is a provision that would provide holders of stablecoins with rewards such as interest payments, which banks have argued could cause deposit flight as savers move their funds away from lenders. Republican senators have also argued the rewards could harm community banks.

The final text of the bill aims to address these concerns by proposing new powers for the Secretary of the Treasury to restrict rewards or incentives available to stablecoin holders if they determine that community banks face a “substantial detrimental impact” driven by deposit flows.

Ethics provisions within the text have also sparked protest from Democratic senators. They have argued that these need to be strengthened to prevent public officials such as President Trump and his family from holding crypto assets, and noted that the text put the power to enforce these measures in the hands of the Department of Justice (DoJ) potentially leaving it up to partisan interpretation.

In the final text, so-called “covered individuals” including those in public office or their spouses, must divest “significant” crypto assets or place them in a blind trust. It also provides state attorneys general the power to investigate and sue to enforce these rules.

Critics still argue that the updated text does not go far enough. Staff for the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who is the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, described the final ethics text as "empty," arguing that and that Trump's Office of Government Ethics would still be able to unilaterally shut down any lawsuits.

The Republican senator for Wyoming Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the U.S. Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee, said: “After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready. President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in U.S. history. This text is truly bipartisan and includes more than 120 of Democrats’ demands.”

The Senate will vote on the act on 15 September, with support numbers for the bill still unclear. For the bill to pass, all Republicans in the Senate must back it along with seven Democrats or independents.

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