The CLARITY ACT has a senate vote date. The gaming industry needs to show up.
May 13, 2026•9 min
On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee will convene to mark up the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, the first serious attempt by the U.S. federal government to define how digital assets, tokens, smart contracts, and decentralized technologies will be treated under American law. The White House has set a July 4 target for passage. The clock is running.
Most of the coverage around this bill focuses on crypto exchanges, stablecoins, and institutional finance. That framing misses the industry arguably with the most to gain or lose from how this legislation is written: gaming.
Xsolla has been in this conversation from the beginning. We submitted formal recommendations to the U.S. Senate as part of the Request for Information process, and we've watched this debate closely because we see its consequences every day across the more than 2,000 developers we work with globally. What follows is our honest read on where things stand, what the bill gets right, what still needs work, and why this moment matters more than most people in our industry realize.
How we got here and why it took this long
The U.S. gaming industry sits at an intersection that the law has never properly mapped. Games have always created value through entertainment, community, creativity, and competition. But modern game economies do something older ones couldn't: they let players, creators, and contributors own a piece of what they help build. Digital assets made that possible. Tokens that grant access, unlock content, represent earned achievements, or power player-driven marketplaces are now foundational tools for a generation of developers. But under existing U.S. law, those same tokens can be classified as securities not because of what they do, but because the legal framework predates them entirely. The result has been years of enforcement-by-ambiguity. Studios face legal exposure not for doing anything wrong, but for building products that the law hasn't yet categorized. Legal teams issue conservative guidance. Finance teams flag risk. Products are scoped down or relocated to jurisdictions with clearer rules. The UAE, Europe, and Southeast Asia didn't beat the U.S. on talent or infrastructure. They beat us on regulatory certainty, and they did it while we were waiting. The January markup attempt failed. A combination of opposition from the banking industry and unresolved disagreements within the crypto sector derailed it. The May 14 date represents a second attempt, and the groundwork laid since January, particularly around stablecoin yield provisions and SEC-CFTC jurisdiction, suggests meaningful progress. But the bill still has work to do before it earns the full support it needs.What the bill gets right for gaming
The CLARITY Act's most important contribution is definitional. By establishing a clear distinction between digital securities and digital commodities, the bill finally gives developers a framework for understanding what they're building before they build it. That sounds basic. For an industry that has operated without that framework for years, it's transformative. Several specific provisions matter directly to game developers: Jurisdictional clarity between the SEC and CFTC. One of the most paralyzing aspects of the current environment is that studios can face exposure from multiple regulatory directions simultaneously. The bill's effort to define which agency governs which type of asset removes a layer of uncertainty that has made legal review of game economy features enormously expensive and slow. Compliant pathways for capital formation. Developers who want to fund projects through digital mechanisms, such as token launches, community raises, and ecosystem funds, currently do so in legal grey territory. The CLARITY Act creates pathways that make this possible without the risk that doing so triggers securities violations after the fact. Consumer protections with teeth. This matters both ethically and strategically. Player trust is the foundation of any sustainable game economy. Regulation that establishes clear safeguards for users isn't at odds with developers' interests; it's aligned with them. Studios that can point to a compliant, protected ecosystem build audiences more effectively than those operating in grey markets. Recognition of decentralized systems. Modern blockchain games don't always have a central operator. Protocols, DAOs, and smart-contract-governed economies are real and increasingly common. Legal recognition of how these systems actually function, rather than forcing them into legacy categories, is essential for next-generation game infrastructure.What Xsolla's Senate submission asked for
Supporting the CLARITY Act broadly is not the same as endorsing every line of it. Our formal recommendations to the Senate were specific, and they remain relevant as the bill moves through the markup process. Game-focused tokens are not securities. This is the foundational ask. A token that unlocks a character skin, grants access to a game mode, or rewards a player for completing a challenge is not an investment contract. It does not generate returns. It does not represent ownership in an enterprise. Treating it as a security misapplies a legal framework designed for a different instrument entirely. The bill needs language that explicitly carves out functional game tokens from securities classification. Safe harbor for royalty-splitting smart contracts. One of the most powerful applications of blockchain in gaming is the ability to automatically distribute value among contributors, developers, modders, artists, and community builders through smart contracts that execute without a central intermediary. These mechanisms are already in use. They need explicit statutory protection so developers can deploy them without fear that splitting revenue will automatically trigger regulatory scrutiny. Exclude non-transferable governance tokens. Governance tokens that let players vote on game direction, contribute to community decisions, or shape roadmap priorities are increasingly common tools for building genuine player investment in a title's future. When those tokens are non-transferable and can't be bought or sold, they carry no meaningful investment risk. Classifying them as securities is a category error that would chill one of the most promising mechanisms for player-developer alignment that the industry has developed. Proportional compliance for small studios. Regulatory frameworks designed with institutional actors in mind have a well-documented tendency to consolidate industries around the players who can afford compliance. Independent studios, small teams, and solo developers are where most of gaming's creative risk-taking happens. Compliance pathways need to be scaled to the size of the operation, not built to a standard that only the largest publishers can meet. Peer-to-peer transfer and self-custody protections. Players who earn, own, and trade in-game assets should have the legal right to do so directly, without mandatory intermediation. Self-custody, the ability to hold your own digital assets without routing through a platform, is a core principle of digital ownership. Statutory protection for these rights isn't a niche technical request. It's the foundation of what makes player-owned economies meaningful rather than cosmetic.The third stream: why this matters beyond studios
There's a dimension of this debate that rarely gets enough attention in policy conversations: what digital asset regulation means for individual players, creators, and community contributors. Gaming has historically offered two ways to participate economically: you can be employed in the industry or spend money as a consumer. The rise of digital asset-powered game economies is creating a third option: earning value through genuine participation and contribution. This isn't speculative. Players who build popular mods, create content that drives discovery, contribute to a game's community ecosystem, or engage deeply over time are generating real value for the studios whose products they support. Blockchain-enabled game economies can recognize and reward that contribution directly through micro-royalties, earned tokens, and ownership stakes in the digital assets whose value their participation helped create. This matters most for the people most often left out of gaming's economic upside: independent creators, players in markets where traditional employment in the industry is limited, and contributors whose work drives platform growth without compensation. Good regulation doesn't just protect institutional actors. It creates the legal foundation for a more equitable distribution of value across the people who actually make gaming what it is. Xsolla's own infrastructure investment reflects this conviction. Xsolla ZK, built on the ZK Sync protocol, is designed to give developers the tools to launch secure, interoperable game assets and player economies with full transparency and control. The technical capability exists. The regulatory foundation is what's still being built.The opposition is real, and it needs to be engaged honestly
The banking industry's concerns about the CLARITY Act deserve a serious response, not dismissal. Banking trade associations have raised legitimate questions about stablecoin yield provisions, specifically whether yield-bearing stablecoins could draw deposits away from the insured banking system that funds mortgages, small-business loans, and consumer credit. That concern is real for the banking sector. But it is largely separate from the provisions that matter most to gaming. Game tokens are not stablecoins. Player economies are not deposit substitutes. The legislative work needed to address banking industry concerns should not come at the expense of the definitional clarity and developer protections the gaming industry needs. The deal reached between Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks on stablecoin yield, distinguishing between rewards earned through activity versus rewards paid simply for holding, represents exactly the kind of specific, technical compromise this bill needs more of. That approach should extend to the gaming provisions: precise language about what game tokens are, how they function, and why they belong in a different regulatory category from the financial instruments that the securities law was designed to govern.What the next 60 days require
The May 14 markup is the beginning of the final legislative stretch, not the end. Several things need to happen for the CLARITY Act to become law in a form that actually serves the gaming industry. The committee markup needs to produce a bill that retains the gaming-specific provisions, functional token carve-outs, smart contract protections, and proportional compliance frameworks without trading them away to resolve other disputes. Bipartisan support is still needed for Senate floor passage, and the minimum threshold is seven Democratic votes. The amendments required to secure that support are achievable, but they need to add precision rather than remove it. The White House's July 4 target is aggressive. A more realistic window may extend into fall, but the November midterms create a hard deadline. A Democratic shift in the House after those elections would reset the legislative calculus entirely. This version of the CLARITY Act does not survive that shift. The gaming industry has 35,000 reasons, the jobs lost over the past three years, to take that deadline seriously. It has a projected global blockchain gaming market size of $300 billion by 2030, so it's worth considering whether that growth happens in the U.S. or elsewhere.The U.S. built modern gaming. This is the moment to decide what comes next.
The developers, studios, creators, and players who make up this industry have been waiting for legal clarity long enough to know what the absence of it costs. Talent has left. Capital has followed. The infrastructure that should have been built here is being built in jurisdictions that acted first. The CLARITY Act is not a perfect bill. It has provisions that need refinement, compromises that still need to be struck, and opposition that still needs to be addressed. But it is the most serious attempt Congress has made to govern digital assets in a way that reflects how they actually work, and the best near-term opportunity for the gaming industry to secure the legal foundation it needs to lead the next decade of digital innovation. Xsolla will continue to engage in this process directly, as advocates and as builders. We'd encourage every studio, developer, creator, and platform that cares about the future of game economies to do the same. The vote is on May 14. The window is now.Featured articles
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