CLARITY Act

The CLARITY Act, formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, is US legislation that assigns regulatory jurisdiction over digital assets. The House of Representatives passed it 294 to 134 in July 2025, sending it to the Senate, and it represents the most comprehensive attempt to date to define which agency oversees which crypto asset.

Why it matters

The bill's core move is to split oversight between the two US market regulators. Digital commodities, assets whose value derives from a functioning and sufficiently decentralized blockchain, fall primarily to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, while assets sold as investment contracts remain with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It also creates registration and disclosure pathways for exchanges and brokers, replacing the case-by-case enforcement that governed the industry through the early 2020s.

For bitcoin the practical effect is confirmation rather than change. Regulators had already treated bitcoin as a commodity, a position the CFTC first articulated in 2015, and the act moves that treatment toward statute. The bill's final shape depends on the Senate, where negotiations continued after House passage.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

Gold has enjoyed settled commodity status for more than a century, and that legal certainty underpins its institutional ownership. The CLARITY Act is bitcoin's bid for the same footing, and supporters argue that statutory clarity removes one of the last structural advantages gold held over bitcoin among conservative allocators.