635 pages, 126 changes, and a betting market that contradicts itself

Senate Republicans sent Democrats a 635-page revised CLARITY Act on Sunday, two days before the procedural vote, Cointelegraph reports. Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the digital assets subcommittee, put it out with Banking chairman Tim Scott and Agriculture chairman John Boozman. The text carries 126 changes made at Democratic request over a year of talks.

“After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready.”

— Cynthia Lummis, Statement on the revised CLARITY Act, 13 September 2026

Cynthia Lummis, chair of the Senate Banking digital assets subcommittee

The CLARITY Act vote on Tuesday at 2:15 pm Eastern is cloture on the motion to proceed, which needs 60 senators and decides whether the bill reaches floor debate. Passage is a later question. We went through what the revised text does to DeFi operators last week, and the new offer changes three things beyond that.

What the final offer adds

The ethics package is the concession Democrats pushed hardest for, and Lummis notes that President Trump agreed to the restrictions voluntarily:

• State attorneys general would enforce a ban on federal officials, judges and their spouses issuing, sponsoring or holding significant digital asset positions.
• The penalty is $500,000 or 20% of the amounts received, whichever is greater, so the flat sum binds on anything under $2.5 million and the percentage takes over above it.
• The ethics rules start 360 days after enactment, or sooner if the regulations are finished first.

Two other changes matter to people who run infrastructure. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act protections that stop developers being treated as money transmitters now extend to miners and validators, and references to Section 1960 of Title 18, the unlicensed money transmitting statute, come out of the text. On stablecoins, the Treasury Secretary gains a duty to write rules limiting rewards if community banks start losing deposits in volume, and that authority expires 18 months after enactment.

The market that stopped adding up

The headline number hides a stranger picture. The liquid contract on the act being signed into law this year trades at 31.5% with $16.2 million behind it, up from 16% on 6 September. Traders on the same platform also price how many senators vote yes, and those contracts are thin enough to contradict each other.

Over 58 senators voting yes trades at 48%. Over 60 trades at 52.5%. A vote count above 60 is a subset of one above 58, so the second number cannot exceed the first, and here it does by 4.5 points. The combined volume across all six vote-count contracts is about $17,000, against $16.2 million on the headline market. We found the same pattern in an XRP contract on Kalshi last week, where the bullish signal came from a market holding $89,000.

The contracts on individual senators carry about $27,000 between them. Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, is priced at 40% to vote yes, and Jerry Moran of Kansas, also a Republican, at 13.5%. On the Democratic side Catherine Cortez Masto sits at 26%, Kirsten Gillibrand at 26.5%, Mark Warner at 22% and Lisa Blunt Rochester at 15.5%. Traders are not expecting the sixty to come from a clean party split.

Tuesday

The bill arrives finished, the vote arrives Tuesday, and the market that prices the outcome doubled its odds in a week while its own vote-count contracts stopped adding up. A year of negotiation produced 126 changes, one every 2.9 days, and all of it now rests on which senators agree to let the debate start.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice; treat it as information to consider.