Development
The CLARITY Act just cleared the committee. Now comes the hard part.
May 15, 2026•10 min
Today marked a historic moment for digital asset regulation in the United States. The Senate Banking Committee voted with bipartisan support to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, the first time a comprehensive digital asset framework has ever cleared a congressional committee. The bill now moves to a full Senate floor vote, where it will need broad bipartisan support to become law.
This is progress. Real, meaningful progress. But for the gaming industry, the work is just beginning.
Most coverage of this bill centers on crypto exchanges, stablecoins, and institutional finance. That framing continues to miss the industry with arguably the most at stake in how this legislation ultimately gets written: gaming. Xsolla has had a seat at the table in this conversation, engaging directly with U.S. lawmakers, submitting formal recommendations, and tracking this debate closely because we see its consequences every day across the more than 2,000 developers we work with globally. Here is our honest read on what today's vote means, what still needs to happen, and why the gaming industry needs to be loud in this next phase.
What's Actually At Stake
Let's be direct. The U.S. gaming industry has lost more than 35,000 jobs over the past three years. The global blockchain gaming market is projected to reach approximately $300 billion by 2030. That growth is coming; the only question is where it lands. Without a clear legal framework, studios will continue evaluating jurisdictions that have already answered the questions Congress has yet to resolve. Every month of ambiguity is a month the U.S. falls further behind in a race it should be leading. This is not a crypto story. It is an American competitiveness story. The infrastructure, jobs, investment, and innovation that will define the next generation of gaming are being built right now, and they will be built somewhere. The CLARITY Act is what keeps that somewhere being here.How We Got Here
The U.S. gaming industry has long sat at an intersection that the law was never built to map. And the stakes are not small. According to the Entertainment Software Association, U.S. consumers spent $60.7 billion on video games in 2025, the second-highest total in U.S. history, trailing only the pandemic-era peak of 2021. Gaming is not a niche. It is America's dominant entertainment category, and it is still growing. Games create value through entertainment, community, creativity, and competition. Modern game economies do something older ones couldn't: they let players, creators, and contributors own a piece of what they help build. Blockchain has made that possible. Tokens and NFTs 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 regulation by enforcement with no clear guidance or regulation. Studios faced legal exposure not for doing anything wrong, but for building products the law had not yet categorized. Legal teams issued conservative guidance. Finance teams flagged risk. Products got significantly scaled 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 while we were playing defense against the future. A markup attempt in January failed when opposition from the banking industry and unresolved disagreements within the crypto sector derailed the scheduled vote. Today's result represents genuine progress over that outcome. But the harder vote is still ahead.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 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 is genuinely transformative. Several provisions matter directly to game developers and to Xsolla's ability to serve them: Jurisdictional clarity between the SEC and CFTC. Studios have faced exposure from multiple regulatory directions simultaneously. Defining 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, and that has made Xsolla's own work supporting developers in this space more complicated than it needs to be. Compliant pathways for capital formation. Developers who want to fund projects through digital mechanisms such as token launches, community raises, and ecosystem funds currently operate in legal grey territory. The CLARITY Act creates pathways that allow this without risking securities violations after the fact. This matters for our developers and the broader health of the game-funding ecosystem. Consumer protections with teeth. Player trust is the foundation of any sustainable game economy. Regulation that establishes clear safeguards for users is not at odds with developers' interests; it aligns with them. It is also aligned with Xsolla's interest in building commerce infrastructure that developers and players can rely on with confidence. 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 and for platforms like Xsolla that need to integrate with them responsibly.What Xsolla's Senate Submission Asked For And Still Requires
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 fully relevant as the bill moves toward a floor vote. Game-focused tokens are not securities: 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 investment returns. It does not represent ownership in an enterprise. Treating it as a security misapplies a legal framework designed for a fundamentally different instrument. The final bill needs explicit language that carves out functional game tokens from the securities classification, and Xsolla wants that clarity to continue to build, expand, and operate the compliant commerce infrastructure our developers depend on. Safe harbor for royalty-splitting smart contracts: Blockchain enables automatic distribution of value among contributors, developers, modders, artists, and community builders through smart contracts that execute trustlessly without a central intermediary. These technologies have been successfully operating in legitimate commerce for years. It is time for the technology to be afforded the necessary statutory protections so developers can deploy them without fear that splitting revenue will trigger undue regulatory scrutiny. Xsolla ZK, a permissionless Web3 infrastructure built on the ZK Sync protocol, is designed to support exactly these kinds of economies. The law has always been expected to evolve alongside technology Web3 should be no exception. Exclude governance tokens: Governance tokens are a means to enable players to participate in the evolution of the games they play voting on direction, shaping priorities, and ensuring their voices reach the developers building for them. This is consumership, not ownership. Players gain meaningful engagement, not a stake in a common enterprise. Improperly 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 for institutional actors create a two-tiered industry where only those who can afford compliance overhead get to participate. Independent studios and solo developers where gaming's creative risk-taking happens are shut out. Blockchain technology solves this. Permissionless, compliant commerce infrastructure like Xsolla ZK gives every developer, from solo creators to major publishers, access to the same secure, transparent, and trustless commercial foundation. The focus shifts from navigating regulatory complexity to building great games. Legislation should reinforce this not recreate the very barriers the technology eliminates. 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 is not a niche technical ask. It is the foundation of what makes player-owned economies meaningful rather than cosmetic, and it shapes how Xsolla ZK serves as the infrastructure layer beneath them.The Third Stream: Why This Matters Beyond Studios
There is a dimension of this debate that rarely surfaces in policy conversations: what digital asset regulation means for individual players, creators, and community contributors. Gaming has historically offered two ways to participate economically: employment in the industry or consumer spending. Digital asset-powered game economies are creating a third: earning real value through genuine participation and contribution. Players who build popular mods, create content that drives discovery, or engage deeply with a community over time are generating value that blockchain-enabled economies can now recognize and reward directly through micro-royalties, earned tokens, and ownership stakes in the digital items 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 industry employment is limited, and contributors whose work drives platform growth without compensation. Good regulation doesn't just protect institutional actors. It clears the path for a more equitable distribution of value across the people who actually make gaming what it is.The Opposition Is Real, And The Path Through It Is Specific
Today's vote makes the challenge ahead clear. The banking industry's concerns about stablecoins didn't disappear with today's markup. Traditional banks argue that yield-bearing stablecoins could draw deposits away from the insured banking system. Law enforcement groups have raised concerns about illicit finance provisions. The AFL-CIO has raised concerns about systemic risk to retirement savings. These concerns deserve engagement, not dismissal. But they are largely separable from what gaming needs. Game tokens are not stablecoins. Player economies are not deposit substitutes. The legislative work required to address these concerns should not come at the expense of the definitional clarity and developer protections this industry depends on. Several senators expressed a desire to keep working toward broader support, an encouraging signal that the votes needed for floor passage remain persuadable.What Happens Next And Why The Timeline Is Unforgiving
The committee vote is done. The floor vote is what matters now, and the path is narrow. The bill needs broad bipartisan support for Senate passage, then reconciliation with the House version before it can reach the president. The White House has set a July 4 target, which is aggressive. A more realistic window may extend into fall, but the November midterm elections create a hard deadline. If the political landscape shifts after those elections, it is likely this version of the CLARITY Act will not survive.The U.S. Built Modern Gaming. This Is The Moment To Decide What Comes Next.
Today's vote is a milestone. It is the furthest this legislation has ever advanced, and it reflects months of serious engagement on genuinely difficult questions. But a committee vote is not a law. The harder work building the bipartisan coalition needed for floor passage, refining the provisions that still need precision, and keeping gaming's specific needs visible in a debate dominated by finance and crypto narratives begins now. Xsolla will continue to engage directly in this process, as advocates and builders. The CLARITY Act is not a perfect bill. It has provisions that need refinement and opposition that 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 it is the best near-term opportunity for the gaming industry to secure the legal foundation it needs. What you build next may depend on what gets decided in the next few months. We'd encourage every studio, developer, creator, and platform that cares about the future of game economies to do more than watch from the sidelines. Stand With Crypto, the advocacy organization representing nearly 3 million Americans, has an active campaign where you can contact your senators directly and register your support: standwithcrypto.org The window is short. Make your voice heard. The views expressed in this article represent Xsolla's perspective on pending legislation and are intended for informational purposes only. Nothing in this article constitutes legal or financial advice. Readers should consult qualified legal counsel regarding their own compliance obligations. ¹ The committee vote was 15-9, advancing largely along party lines, with two Democrats voting in favor. Senate floor passage requires broad bipartisan support. Chris Hewish is President of Xsolla, a global game commerce platform supporting over 2,000 developers worldwide. For media inquiries, contact press@xsolla.com or visit xsolla.com.Featured articles
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