Lummis Publishes CLARITY Act Amendment Setting 360-Day Clock for Bitcoin (BTC) Market Rules

CFTC Registration at the Core

US Senator Cynthia Lummis has released a revised draft of the CLARITY Act, the Republican-led market-structure bill that would give digital assets their first comprehensive statutory rulebook in the United States, and the amendment posted to her official Senate website is explicit about where the regulatory lines fall. Spot trading in digital commodities would sit under Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) supervision, and digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers would become formal CFTC registration categories. That single designation addresses the jurisdictional ambiguity that has left assets such as XRP's securities-status dispute unresolved for years, since commodity versus security treatment determines which agency — and which rulebook — governs the token. On stablecoins, the draft restricts paying interest or yield purely as compensation for holding a payment stablecoin, while allowing rewards tied to actual payments or genuine service use under defined conditions. Self-custody receives explicit protection: the text bars authorities from treating a user's directly held assets as dormant property merely because they have gone untraded for an extended period. The amendment also lightens the burden on infrastructure participants, specifying that simply writing blockchain software or operating a network node — work that can involve ordering transactions and handling Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) — does not by itself subject developers or operators to the obligations applied to financial firms. An ethics provision restricts sitting officials and their spouses from issuing or promoting specific digital assets for compensation while in office. Broader chapters cover decentralized finance, tokenized securities, NFTs, customer asset protection and illicit-finance controls. Unless a separate provision states otherwise, the legislation would take effect 360 days after enactment. The market-structure debate it feeds into is the same one that shaped Washington's earlier discussion of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, underscoring how far digital-asset policy has moved into mainstream legislative work.

UK Lords Vote 194–138

While US lawmakers refine statutory text, the United Kingdom's House of Lords took its own step on September 9, approving an amendment to the Financial Services Markets bill that obliges the government to adopt a formal digital asset strategy. The division landed at 194 votes in favor and 138 against — a decisive majority in the upper chamber. Under the amendment, within 12 months of the bill becoming law, the Treasury must publish a strategy spanning cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized securities, and open it to public consultation. The mandate is procedural rather than prescriptive: ministers must produce and consult on a framework, but the amendment does not dictate its contents. Notably, the government opposed the measure, meaning the amendment now returns to the House of Commons, which retains the option to accept it, revise it, or reject it outright — the familiar legislative back-and-forth that determines whether the obligation survives into the final statute. For market participants, the three-pillar scope matters: naming stablecoins and tokenized securities alongside cryptocurrencies signals that the UK intends to regulate the asset class as market infrastructure rather than as an enforcement afterthought. Venue selection is central to that regime, and traders weighing which platforms are best positioned under a tightening UK framework can consult our overview of Best Crypto Exchanges. A rejection in the Commons would leave UK digital-asset policy where it stands today — guidance-led and discretionary — so the coming parliamentary round is the event to watch. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

360-Day Clock After Passage

Read together, the two developments mark a coordinated legislative turn: the two largest Western financial centers are moving from enforcement-defined ambiguity toward written statutes within the same week. COINOTAG's reading of the amendment text is that it remains a proposal, not a final rule — it binds no one until both chambers pass the bill and it is signed, at which point implementation begins 360 days after enactment absent a separate provision, binding exchanges, brokers and dealers seeking CFTC registration. The UK amendment faces the same test: it is an instruction to the Treasury that the Commons can still strike. The direction of travel, however, is now unmistakable.