DeFi leaders press lawmakers after CLARITY markup postponed

The US Senate Banking Committee has indefinitely postponed a markup of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY), and leaders in decentralized finance are using the delay to press lawmakers on concerns with the bill. Crypto industry groups had raised objections to provisions related to tokenized equities, stablecoin rewards and their potential impact on DeFi platforms.

The DeFi Education Fund said on Wednesday that some proposed amendments could "seriously harm DeFi technology and/or make market structure legislation worse for software developers." Crypto venture capital firms said the legislation would need revisions to address concerns around DeFi and developer protections.

Alexander Grieve, vice president of government affairs at Paradigm, said the highest priority was protecting developers and DeFi and that the bill needed "significant edits." Jake Chervinsky, chief legal officer of Variant, said his "top concern" was DeFi and that the bill "fell short of standards," writing on X that "the last draft leaves ambiguity about whether all sorts of developers and infrastructure providers could be forced to KYC users, register with SEC, or comply with other rules that don’t fit DeFi." Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott announced a "brief pause" after Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, said on X that the exchange could not support the bill as written.

Key Topics

Crypto, Clarity Act, Senate Banking Committee, Defi, Coinbase, Defi Education Fund