The Senate’s crypto market structure bill is slipping again, and this time the delay appears to be coming from one of the lawmakers closest to the negotiations.
Senator Thom Tillis told Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott that the panel should not move forward with a markup of the CLARITY Act in April, according to Punchbowl. Instead, Tillis said, the committee should be looking at May for the next formal step.
The message was not especially vague. Speaking to reporters on Monday night, Tillis said he does not expect the Senate Banking Committee to mark up the crypto market structure bill this month. “We need to be looking at May as a markup time,” he said, adding that it was important not to move too quickly and to make sure all sides were heard before final decisions were made.
That matters because the CLARITY Act has become one of the central legislative efforts to define how the United States wants to regulate crypto markets more broadly. Any slowdown in committee progress tends to ripple outward, especially when the issue holding things up is one of the more politically sensitive parts of the bill.
According to Tillis, negotiators still need more time to finalize a compromise between the banking sector and crypto industry over stablecoin yields. That has emerged as one of the harder disputes in the legislation.
At the heart of the disagreement is whether crypto firms should be allowed to offer interest or yield on idle stablecoin balances, something banks have long viewed as a competitive threat if it starts to resemble deposit-taking through a different wrapper.
Tillis’ comments suggest that while talks are continuing, the agreement is not ready to be rushed through committee. He is now signaling that a Senate Banking Committee markup may be more realistic in mid-May.
That pushes back the timeline, but it also says something else. The bill is not stalled because lawmakers have lost interest. It is being delayed because the remaining issues are the ones that actually define how crypto and traditional finance will be allowed to overlap.
