Senator Bernie Moreno warns that failure to advance the CLARITY Act to the full Senate floor by May will kill the legislation for 2026, creating a critical three-week window that could trigger a 10% XRP price correction. The bill, targeting a committee markup in late April, would formally classify XRP as a digital commodity under CFTC oversight, stripping the SEC of primary authority and potentially resolving the asset's long-standing regulatory uncertainty.
The CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633) passed the House with a bipartisan 294–134 vote on July 17, 2025, assigning primary digital commodity oversight to the CFTC while limiting SEC jurisdiction over assets that qualify under the new framework.
The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its version on January 29, 2026, but the Banking Committee – chaired by Tim Scott – has yet to markup, with unresolved disputes around DeFi regulatory provisions and tokenization treatment holding up the calendar.
The Senate returns from Easter recess on April 13, and Scott’s committee has a targeted markup window in the final two weeks of April.
The stablecoin yield dispute that stalled earlier negotiations appears to be resolving: Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks reached a compromise in principle on March 20 that bans passive yield on stablecoin balances but permits activity-based rewards tied to payments and platform use.
BREAKING: Banks and crypto firms have privately agreed on a deal for the Bitcoin market structure bill.
An announcement is expected this week.
The CLARITY Act has been stuck since January over one dispute, whether crypto platforms can offer yield on stablecoins.
That fight… pic.twitter.com/YbCtOulJU3
Senator Cynthia Lummis confirmed at the Chamber of Digital Commerce Blockchain Summit that DeFi provisions are finalized, projecting committee markup in late April followed by a mid-2026 floor vote.
The honest read on the scheduling math: Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn has flagged that with only 18 working weeks remaining before the midterm recess on October 5, each week of delay compresses floor consideration time to the point where 2026 passage becomes structurally implausible without Banking Committee clearance by April’s end.
The SEC and CFTC jointly classified XRP as a digital commodity on March 17 – but that classification is an interpretive release, not statute.
A future administration could reverse it. Banks and large asset managers won’t commit capital at scale on the basis of an administrative determination alone. The CLARITY Act would make the commodity classification permanent federal law, and that distinction is the entire mechanism behind the bull case.
This whole Ripple XRP setup is basically riding on one thing, the CLARITY Act, because if it gets through the Banking Committee in late April, that is the switch that brings real institutional money off the sidelines, not just talk but actual flows, and that is where projections like $4–$8 billion in ETF inflows start to matter, especially when we have already seen strong demand even without full legal clarity, which is how you get price pushing through $1.60 and aiming higher.
The key detail most people miss is that this is not just hype around regulation, it is about certainty, because right now institutions can look at Ripple XRP but cannot fully commit, and that is why even something like the SEC CFTC classification did not move things structurally, it helps sentiment but does not unlock capital, while a law like CLARITY changes the rules completely and makes deployment easier.
If that approval gets delayed past May, the whole story weakens fast, because without it XRP just falls back into tracking Bitcoin, and with BTC already moving sideways, that means no strong independent move, and if macro pressure hits again, downside opens quickly.
The timeline shift from Ripple itself is also telling, with expectations already getting pushed back, which is usually a sign things are not as smooth behind the scenes as they look publicly.
So right now everything narrows down to that late April window, because if the committee moves, momentum hits fast, but if it stalls, this turns from a catalyst driven breakout setup into just another range with fading hype.
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