Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I am incredibly proud today to stand before you to share my support for the CLARITY Act. This is legislation that we have been working on in the Agriculture Committee for 7 years. This is an improvement over the legislation that fulfilled the very same purpose of what we are addressing today that passed last Congress with over 300 votes, including 71 Democrats, and it was a great bipartisan bill. This is an improvement on that bill.

The CLARITY Act is about three related ideas: certainty, protection, and innovation. I will talk about why each of these ideas is important.

First, the CLARITY Act provides regulatory certainty for all corners of the digital asset ecosystem, including issuers; exchanges; intermediaries; builders; software developers; and, most importantly, users of digital assets.

This regulatory certainty means that all parts of the ecosystem can engage with digital assets with confidence. It promotes healthy markets by establishing commonsense requirements to protect consumers. Those are all built on the existing requirements in the financial services markets.

Secondly, the CLARITY Act protects good actors from government overreach. By establishing clear rules, we limit the government's ability to subjectively enforce vague statutes. These protections are important to those entities like exchanges, brokers, and dealers, who we require to register. Yet, in many cases, they are more important to entities which Congress is not seeking to register.

Third, and most importantly, the CLARITY Act supports innovation across the economy, not just the crypto economy.

At the House Agriculture Committee, we heard testimony from numerous stakeholders about innovative ways in which developers and entrepreneurs are leveraging blockchain to build projects and services using blockchains and digital assets.

The certainty and protections provided through the CLARITY Act will lead to the development of a new generation of services, tools, and systems. I am excited for that future to happen here in the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, Congress has a historic opportunity here today to act. With the CLARITY Act, we can pass legislation that protects consumers and ensures that the United States remains at the forefront of technological innovation. These are not mutually exclusive goals. They are mutually reinforcing goals.

By supporting the CLARITY Act, we can create a safer, more transparent, and more accessible environment for digital assets.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I was remiss with my opening comments not to thank my Agriculture Committee partner, Ranking Member Angie Craig, for her leadership and for working together with me on this issue, but also our Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill; my good friend, Don Davis; Whip Emmer; Bryan Steil, and so many more. There was just such a strong bipartisan leadership partner team.
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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I will expand for a minute on the important protections included in the CLARITY Act. The CLARITY Act includes strong protections for the developers of software. Sections 309 and 409 make it clear that neither the CFTC nor the SEC have the authority to require a person to register just because that person is developing, publishing, or distributing software. This is a critical protection, rooted in our First Amendment, that should be read expansively by the commissions.

The creation of new decentralized finance protocols is also an important development that the CLARITY Act seeks to protect. Both the CFTC and the SEC must carefully examine and understand DeFi, which is why we are requiring both Commissions to undertake a robust study on the unique benefits and risks of DeFi.

Through the CLARITY Act, Congress is making an unambiguous statement that DeFi is different, and it should be treated differently from the centralized custodial intermediaries. Protecting this emerging technology is an essential purpose of the CLARITY Act.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman who just spoke for his remarks concerning the need for high-speed broadband. My pledge, as the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, is that when we are back in September, we will have farm bill 2.0, which includes rural economic development and rural broadband. We have to get that done.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Carter), a cosponsor of the CLARITY Act, for 1 minute.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time is remaining.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. He is a very busy man.

Mr. JOHNSON of South Dakota. Mr. Speaker, it has been such an honor to work with G.T., French, Angie, Don, Brian, and so many others on something that is real.

It is sometimes hard to separate the real from the fake in this town. That is certainly true for digital assets, NFTs, and memecoins. These generate tremendous attention, and they can pull our gaze away from what really matters.

Here is what matters: Blockchain technology, Web3, will transform every single industry in the same way that the internet has transformed every single industry over the last 30 years. That transformation will happen much faster than people realize if we can keep government from continuing to screw this up.

This is not about buying bubble gum with bitcoin. This is about blockchain innovation happening here rather than overseas, about more liquid capital markets, about small businesses creating new services and products, about removing friction from transactions for every single American, and about protecting consumers so the debacles like the FTX meltdown never happen again.

We tend to overstate the impact of what we do in this town. Everything is historic, even when it is not. However, this is different. This is huge.

Before I came to Congress, I was in the broadband industry, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 provided the regulatory certainty needed to launch the internet era. That was a watershed victory for this country. Mr. Speaker, we are here again.

The regulatory certainty provided by this incredible bipartisan work product will launch a golden age of innovation and the golden age of digital assets. Today, now, this moment, this is a watershed victory for this country. Today we do something real.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from South Dakota for his remarks and, quite frankly, I couldn't agree more. I also thank, again, my Agriculture partner, Ranking Member Angie Craig with the Agriculture Committee, and Don Davis and our leadership and all those who have the foresight to see that this is about the future. Well, it is about today because, you know, companies are struggling with this, but more importantly, it is about the future of both the financial sector and the technological sector.

A vote for the CLARITY Act is a vote for America's future and America's leadership. I urge all my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on the CLARITY Act. I yield back the balance of my time.

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