With Congress back from its Easter recess and optimism reportedly building during the week’s talks over the remaining sticking points in the CLARITY Act, attention has shifted to a new concern: the Senate Banking Committee markup appears to have been pushed back to the final week of April or, potentially, into mid-May.
The delay has quickly become a major talking point, in part because the committee’s schedule, released by Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott for next week, did not include any CLARITY Act markup date.
That absence fueled speculation on social media that the bill could effectively stall or even “die” if it fails to reach a vote by the end of the month.
CLARITY Act Markup Wait ContinuesIn response to those fears, Paradigm’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, Justin Slaughter, argued that the supposed deadline pressure may be overstated. Slaughter said the real time crunch does not begin until after Memorial Day.
On that basis, he suggested there is still a window of roughly six to seven weeks for the bill to move out of the Senate Banking Committee and proceed across the Senate floor.
Sources involved in the negotiations point to ethics and tokenization as areas that remain under discussion. The same reporting suggests that other, more contentious topics—such as DeFi and stablecoin yield—have largely been addressed already, implying that the bill’s hardest political problems may not be the ones blocking it at the moment.
May As The Make-Or-Break MonthThe committee delay also echoes a broader political forecast made earlier in the week by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, as reported by Bitcoinist.
He framed the dynamic as one where compromise becomes more likely when parties reach a peak of frustration, telling reporters, “When people are at their peak frustration, that’s when they finally compromise, and it gets done,” and adding, “I think we’re there.”
Ultimately, the path forward for the CLARITY Act may depend on whether the stablecoin yield text is delivered soon and whether both sides accept the updated agreement.
Featured image from OpenArt, chart from TradingView.com
