U.S. Senate Delays Clarity Act as Banks Expand Tokenized Deposit Networks

The U.S. Senate has delayed the Clarity Act until September, leaving the market structure bill without a final vote before the August recess and pushing digital asset market rules back by at least several weeks. According to ChainCatcher, Matter Labs' Vassilis Tziokas wrote in CoinDesk that banks are moving ahead anyway, with JPMorgan processing more than $3 trillion in transactions through Kinexys and launching the JPMD deposit token, while Citi operates a cross-border treasury token service. The article said the Clearing House and 17 large financial institutions plan to enable on-chain settlement for tokenized deposits by 2027. It argued that interoperability for bank-issued tokenized deposits will come through clearing rather than messaging standards or token bridges, with sending banks redeeming tokens, receiving banks issuing their own tokens, obligations recorded and netted between institutions, and final settlement made in central bank money. The author said the main engineering challenge is meeting privacy, neutrality, and verifiability at the same time. Each institution would need to run its own ledger, verify transfers with cryptographic proofs without exposing underlying data, and anchor the system to a neutral settlement facility with no participating owner. The article added that the Clarity Act would not directly regulate tokenized deposits, but could define the boundaries of the digital asset market and refine the stablecoin framework established by the GENIUS Act. It also cited a Global Financial Markets Association report from April 2026 that listed unresolved gaps, including unified handling of cross-border tokenized deposits and guidance on off-network transfers, which it described as regulatory unlock points for bank-to-bank tokenized money movement.