Negotiations in the US Senate over the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY Act) have entered their final stage, and the sticking point isn’t token securities status or stablecoin reserve requirements — it’s an ethics clause restricting senior government officials from holding direct interests in crypto businesses. According to a July 29 report from South Korea’s Tokenpost, Republican Senator Tom Tillis and Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego have recently focused on rewriting this clause and have reached partial agreement, though the specific text has not yet been made public. The House version of this bill, H.R.3633, passed the House with bipartisan majority support in July 2025. Once the Senate version is finalized, it will complete the two-piece puzzle of US digital asset regulation alongside the GENIUS Act (the stablecoin law) signed into law in July 2025 — one piece governing stablecoin issuance, the other governing market structure and trading venues.
Editorial take: what this news means for the card in your hand
The bottom line first: within the next 7 days, no USDT virtual card’s acquiring capability will change because of this news. The CLARITY Act governs the registration classification of exchanges, market makers, custodians, and tokens (SEC vs. CFTC) — it doesn’t directly set Visa/Mastercard BIN issuance policy. Whether you’re paying your ChatGPT subscription today with the Asia Elite variant of MPCard, nothing changes versus yesterday.
But the 30-to-90-day window deserves closer, segmented attention:
- US BIN users: The most directly affected group is anyone using a US identity plus a US BIN as their primary route. Once the CLARITY Act is finalized, exchange-affiliated US-registered issuers (such as Coinbase Card and parts of Bybit Card’s regional plans) will gain clearer classification grounds — at the cost of finer-grained KYC and transaction monitoring. MPCard’s US Direct variant is currently suspended from issuance — and from a regulatory-timing perspective, this suspension isn’t bad news: reopening a US BIN before the market structure bill is finalized would mean betting compliance costs on a framework that’s still subject to change.
- Asia-route users: Least affected. MPCard Asia Elite’s core logic — Asia-Pacific account + Asia-Pacific IP + Asia-Pacific card BIN, all aligned — has no US-registered entity as a mandatory node in the chain. Readers of the ChatGPT Plus subscription scenario can think of it this way: the merchant is in the US, but the acquiring happens in Asia — the bill only changes the on-chain end.
- The USDT/USDC divergence: With the GENIUS Act already in effect, a finalized CLARITY Act would further clarify the standing of “compliant payment stablecoins” in US payment scenarios. For users who hold ₮ long-term as in-card balance, this is a variable worth watching — not tomorrow, but from 2027 onward.
Historical comparison: what’s different this time
What’s the same: A bill getting stuck on non-core clauses is a recurring pattern in US crypto legislation. In 2022, the Lummis-Gillibrand proposal stalled on SEC/CFTC jurisdictional division; in 2023–2024, FIT21 passed the House but stalled on Senate scheduling. Neither case was about unresolved technical clauses — both were about political cost. This time is no different: the conflict-of-interest clause is fundamentally about drawing a line around the sitting president’s crypto business interests — it’s a political negotiation, not a financial-engineering one.
Two things are different. First, before 2024, every round of this debate was still a bet on “will there be a law at all”; after the GENIUS Act took effect, the bet shifted to “how strict will the rules be.” That’s a shift in kind — from “is it legal” to “how much will compliance cost.” Second, when USDC briefly depegged in March 2023 due to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, stablecoin risk came from reserve banking. Today’s primary risk instead comes from whether issuers’ and exchanges’ compliance licenses can be renewed — risk has moved from the asset side to the channel side. For U-card users, this means the old defensive posture of “watch the reserve reports” isn’t enough anymore — you also need to watch issuer licensing and BIN ownership.
Compliance boundaries: clearly permitted, gray area, clearly prohibited
In the US, topping up a Visa prepaid card with stablecoins for spending is not explicitly prohibited — it’s a gray area determined by the issuer’s licensing: legality depends on whether the issuing institution holds the relevant state-level money transmitter license or partners with a licensed bank, not on which chain the user used. We’ve laid out this boundary in our US compliance overview. What the CLARITY Act does is settle the upstream question of “what category does the asset you’re holding fall into” — once that’s settled, channel providers can no longer use “unclear classification” as an excuse to delay compliance upgrades.
One reminder for a different audience: if you’re a mainland China user, US legislation has far less practical impact on you than the rules in your own jurisdiction. See our mainland China compliance notes and our comparison of U-cards suited to mainland China users for details. The CLARITY Act will not make any route “legal in China.”
Nodes worth watching next
- Public release of the conflict-of-interest clause’s formal text — currently we only have secondhand reports of “partial agreement.” Once the text is public, we can assess how far the Senate version diverges from H.R.3633, and estimate how many more months of conference negotiation remain.
- The Senate Banking Committee’s scheduling — whether the bill moves to a formal markup can be tracked on the Senate Banking Committee’s website via its hearing and agenda pages. This is a harder signal than any media account.
- US issuer terms updates: If user agreements or fee pages for US-related entities like Coinbase and Bybit change within 30 days before or after the bill is finalized, that’s typically an early indicator of compliance restructuring.
- Whether MPCard US Direct resumes issuance — a change in this card’s status will tell you more about the issuer’s read on the US framework’s implementation timeline than any commentary could.
Editorial recommendations
- Users holding MPCard Asia Elite: no action needed. This news changes none of the official fees or limits on the Asia-Pacific route — see the MPCard review for specific figures (data refreshed hourly, official pages remain the source of truth).
- Users waiting for MPCard US Direct to reopen: keep waiting, don’t switch cards over this. Grabbing a US BIN before the Senate text is public means locking into a compliance baseline that could still be rewritten.
- Users primarily relying on US exchange-affiliated cards: use these 30 days to prepare a backup card for subscription charges. This isn’t about anticipating account freezes — compliance restructuring periods typically come with risk-parameter adjustments, and the real pain of a failed subscription payment is losing the service, not losing money.
- Users who don’t touch the US region at all: feel free to skip this news. If you just want to understand the basic mechanics of U-cards, reading What Is a U-Card is more useful than following bill progress.
- What not to do: don’t move large balances into any card account early just because “the US is about to legislate.” A card balance is not a savings account — bill progress has no causal relationship with fund safety.