Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told Punchbowl News on March 13 that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is unlikely to clear the Senate Banking Committee before April, offering no revised target date. The disclosure confirms what prediction markets had already begun pricing in: a bill that passed the House with rare bipartisan momentum is now stalled in the Senate over, most visibly, a dispute about whether stablecoin holders should be allowed to earn interest.

The Clarity Act (H.R. 3633) passed the House in July 2025 with a 294 to 134 vote, making it the most comprehensive crypto legislation ever to clear a single chamber of Congress. Its core purpose is to resolve a long-running jurisdictional fight between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Under the bill, the CFTC would take exclusive oversight of spot markets for sufficiently decentralized digital assets like Bitcoin and Ether, while the SEC would retain authority over tokens tied to ongoing centralized operations. The Senate Banking Committee published a 278-page draft of its version on January 12, 2026.

The bill must pass markup in two Senate committees simultaneously: the Banking Committee handles SEC-related provisions, and the Agriculture Committee handles CFTC provisions. That dual-committee requirement alone complicates scheduling. On top of that, negotiators are wrestling with at least five distinct sticking points, including stablecoin yield, 24/7 operational risk for community banks, DeFi compliance, ethics and conflict-of-interest provisions, and unresolved SEC-CFTC jurisdictional friction. The most publicly visible of these is stablecoin yield. The separate GENIUS Act bans stablecoin issuers from paying yield directly, but that prohibition does not automatically cover third-party platforms like exchanges, which currently offer customers returns on stablecoin deposits. Banks argue this creates dangerous regulatory arbitrage in a stablecoin market now worth more than $307 billion. A White House-set deadline of March 1 for resolving the yield question passed without a public agreement. Coinbase, which earns roughly $1.3 billion annually from stablecoin-related revenue, withdrew its active support for the Senate draft over the yield restrictions.

Senators Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) are leading negotiations on a narrower compromise. Their framework would prohibit passive, savings-account-style yield on stablecoin holdings while allowing rewards tied to actual transaction activity such as payments or transfers. "Handing out rewards to customers can't be about how much money is held in an account, but it might be tied to how active the account is," said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), summarizing the emerging framework. Alsobrooks described the goal as setting "guardrails in place that will help us prevent the deposit flight...and allow innovation to grow." Senate Democrats have also introduced conflict-of-interest provisions that critics say complicate bipartisan deal-making by targeting crypto ventures with ties to the Trump administration.

The delay carries concrete consequences for crypto users in Africa, where the specifics of this Senate negotiation are not abstract. Stablecoins account for 43 percent of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to figures published by CoinGeek. Nigeria absorbed $92.1 billion in on-chain inflows over a 12-month window through mid-2025, according to Chainalysis and TRM Labs, and a 2026 survey reported by Quidax found that 95 percent of Nigerian respondents preferred receiving salary payments in stablecoins. Kenya ranks fifth globally for stablecoin transaction volume, behind the United States, Ukraine, Nigeria, and Vietnam. The AfCFTA ADAPT blockchain, a continental trade settlement layer piloting USDT and USDC on the IOTA network across Kenya and Ghana, is built around dollar-denominated stablecoin infrastructure and is targeting $70 billion in trade settlement by 2035. If the Senate restricts third-party stablecoin yield entirely, platforms such as Yellow Card, Quidax, and Binance that currently offer earn features to African users would face pressure to remove those yield features entirely. A narrower activity-based model, if enacted, would likely become the new compliance template across the continent.

In South Asia, Pakistan moved independently just six days before Thune's statement. President Asif Ali Zardari signed the Virtual Assets Act on March 7, converting the earlier PVARA executive order into a permanent federal institution with a six-month licensing deadline for all crypto service providers. Non-compliance carries fines of up to PKR 50 million (approximately $180,000) and potential imprisonment, underscoring the seriousness of the deadline for operators in the region. Pakistan's framework includes Shariah-compliant provisions that already restrict yield-bearing products on Islamic finance grounds, specifically the prohibition on riba (interest), with a scholar committee evaluating financial instruments against that standard. This approach effectively resolves the stablecoin yield question in the more restrictive direction without waiting for Washington. India, meanwhile, maintains a 30 percent flat tax on crypto gains and no comprehensive legislation, with its Ministry of Finance watching US developments as a potential benchmark. The longer Congress waits, the less precedent India has to reference.

Prediction markets currently place the odds of the Clarity Act passing in 2026 at approximately 72 percent, a figure that has been volatile: odds peaked at around 80 percent before the yield dispute intensified, fell to a low of approximately 55 percent at the height of the uncertainty, and have since partially recovered. The bill also includes a developer carve-out in Section 309 that would protect open-source software contributors and peer-to-peer participants from registration requirements, built on the principle that regulation should follow control rather than code. That provision carries direct relevance for DeFi builders in Lagos, Karachi, and Nairobi. That protection does not exist in law until the Senate acts. Each month of inaction leaves developers, exchanges, and institutional investors operating without final rules, and leaves regulators in fast-moving markets like Nigeria and Kenya with fewer settled international standards to reference.