Senator Bernie Moreno said the U.S. CLARITY Act could clear Congress and become law by April 2026, and he urged negotiators to move faster on the bill’s core sticking point: whether yield-bearing stablecoins should be allowed. Moreno’s April 2026 target was framed as a near-term inflection point for U.S. digital-asset rulemaking.
He positioned the effort as bipartisan and aimed at locking in a definitive framework spanning market structure, stablecoins, and banking integration, but the debate has narrowed around stablecoin yield programs. The dispute has effectively become a trade-off between bank funding stability and stablecoin product innovation.
Yield-Bearing Stablecoins as the Negotiation Fault Line
Banking representatives argue that yield on stablecoins could pull deposits away from traditional institutions, potentially pressuring deposit funding and reducing loan capacity, while crypto industry voices maintain that yield features are central to competitiveness. At issue is whether stablecoin yields are treated as a structural risk to deposit franchises or as a legitimate feature of modern digital money.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, cited alongside Moreno, described the desired endpoint as a “win-win-win” outcome intended to benefit industry participants, banks, and consumers. That “win-win-win” framing has become a recurring negotiating narrative as stakeholders search for workable compromise language.
Market participants should treat the April timeline as directional rather than guaranteed, with reporting noting that prediction markets are assigning a non-trivial probability of passage even as key terms remain unresolved. The timeline is best read as a conditional planning marker until the yield language is actually settled.
If lawmakers adopt strict limits on interest-like payments from stablecoins, the downstream effects could show up quickly in treasury allocation decisions and in the demand profile for issuer-led yield products, with spillovers into stablecoin-linked trading activity. Any tightening of permissible yield could reprice stablecoin utility for both treasuries and trading desks.
What to Monitor Into Q2
Coverage also noted that negotiations have intensified, with a source close to the process highlighting active efforts to reconcile banking safeguards with market innovation. The decisive factor will be technical drafting—definitions of permissible yield, custody rules, and bank access provisions that determine how the framework works in practice.
If enacted, the CLARITY Act would represent a major U.S. regulatory milestone for tokenization and market infrastructure, clarifying which firms can offer custody, payments, and certain yield products; if not, the unresolved yield dispute could extend uncertainty for issuers and institutions. Either outcome will shape issuer strategy and institutional posture heading into the second quarter, with April 2026 remaining the target window Moreno flagged.