Senator Lummis Says Updated Clarity Act Draft Carries Over 100 Democrat Changes for Bitcoin (BTC)

Lummis: Over 100 Democrat Changes

Senator Cynthia Lummis said the refreshed Senate text of the CLARITY Act — the market-structure bill that would define the regulatory lane for Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader digital asset market — now carries more than 100 changes that Democrats requested, and she urged the minority party to help pass it into law. Senate Republicans published the updated substitute text on September 10, and it runs 630 pages, 14 pages longer than the July 22 draft it replaces. A procedural vote scheduled four days later will decide whether the legislation ever reaches the Senate floor. In a September 10 post on X, Lummis framed the revisions as the product of bipartisan work through the August recess: the edits specify when decentralized-in-name-only DeFi protocols must register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and narrow the bill's DeFi provisions to spot and cash transactions, a change she linked to Native American concerns about prediction markets. A line-by-line comparison of the two substitute texts supports that account — the September draft differs from the July version in 14 of its 103 sections, containing 104 discrete edits, of which only 28 run longer than eight words, with all of the substantive movement inside roughly a dozen sections in the Banking and Agriculture titles. The headline number is a political signal as much as a drafting note: Democrats had withheld support pending concessions, and Lummis, who has long pushed to give Bitcoin and other digital assets a clear statutory home, is arguing those concessions are now written into the text itself. Whether that converts into the 60 votes needed for cloture is the question the chamber answers on Tuesday afternoon.

September 10 post on Xhttps://x.com/SenLummis/status/2098124286871433416?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Section 20209 Rewrites the DeFi Safe Harbor

The heaviest edit lands in Section 20209, the DeFi safe harbor, which balloons from 285 words to roughly 2,200. Under the new language, validators, node operators and anyone publishing wallet software receive a full carve-out from the Commodity Exchange Act — codifying the principle that people who never take custody of a private key are not operating a crypto exchange or a brokerage. Front-ends, governance systems, liquidity pools and the upkeep of that wallet software — down to fixes for vulnerabilities such as blind signing — are shielded only from spot-market rules, a narrower protection than software publishers receive. For protocols the bill treats as decentralized in name only, the CFTC must write rules on how controllers comply: a rulemaking mandate rather than an automatic registration trigger, and the code itself is never required to register. Treasury then drafts matching anti-money-laundering rules for whichever entities the Commission pulls in, and DeFi developers have argued that technical compliance designs, from zero-knowledge proofs to on-chain screening, belong in that rulemaking rather than in statute. The quieter change is the preemption clause: state securities, commodities and digital asset law no longer applies to covered activities, and the provision reaches conduct predating enactment — while state fraud, manipulation and AML powers survive, shifting the fight to where licensing ends and fraud begins. Outside the DeFi title, credit unions gain clearer footing keyed to GENIUS Act definitions, and CFTC spot oversight now covers every payment stablecoin rather than only those from licensed issuers. Three politically loaded items did not move: Division C — the ethics title Democrats want amended to address President Donald Trump's crypto holdings — is untouched, as is Section 10404, which bars yield on payment stablecoins, and Section 10604, the developer protections known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. The American Bankers Association and 60 other banking groups asked Senate leaders to tighten the rewards rules, warning of deposit flight from community banks, and Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran have raised concerns. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

60-Vote Cloture Test Tuesday

Our reading of the September 10 substitute is that it remains a draft, not law: nothing binds anyone until enactment, and the most sweeping provisions — federal preemption of state digital asset regimes and the CFTC and Treasury rulemaking mandates — take effect only through rules written after passage. Today the document binds no one; it is leverage. With cloture requiring 60 votes on Tuesday afternoon, the over-100-edit count is Lummis's closing argument that the text has already absorbed Democratic demands, and Bitcoin's long-sought regulatory clarity now rests on whether that arithmetic holds.