The U.S. Senate on Tuesday failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, rejecting cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 by a 49-50 vote and leaving the industry’s flagship market-structure bill 11 votes short of the 60 required to begin formal debate.
According to the Senate Daily Press log, voting began at 2:18 p.m. and the result was announced at 3:00 p.m. Sen. Chris Coons did not vote. Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis voted no; Tillis switched his vote in order to file a motion to reconsider one minute later, a procedural step that keeps the measure on the calendar rather than closing the file.
The bill would have drawn a statutory line between SEC and CFTC oversight of digital assets. It passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 in May. Republicans released a final substitute on Sunday that they said included 126 changes requested by Democrats, including tougher ethics language aimed at officials’ crypto holdings. That was not enough to win a single Democratic vote on the floor, as opponents argued the ethics package still failed to address President Donald Trump’s crypto interests, Reuters reported.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse wrote on X that the outcome “stings” and that “consumers and U.S. competitiveness got left behind,” while pointing to continued rulemaking at the SEC under Chair Paul Atkins and the CFTC under Chair Selig. Sen. Tillis struck a different note, saying in a post that “this is not the end for the Clarity Act” and that the reconsideration motion “allows us to continue working towards a positive outcome.”
The calendar is the other constraint. Congress is heading into a compressed stretch before November midterms, and losing cloture does not formally kill H.R. 3633, but it does freeze floor consideration unless leaders can find additional votes. For now, market-structure certainty that the industry spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing remains with regulators rather than statute.
