Because FIT21 was never enacted, no firm holds a registration under it. Positioning is the story: Coinbase acquired FairX in January 2022 and runs Coinbase Derivatives as a CFTC designated contract market; Kraken acquired TradeStation Crypto in 2024 and closed its 1.5-billion-dollar purchase of NinjaTrader, a CFTC-registered FCM, in May 2025; Robinhood's Bitstamp acquisition (announced June 2024, closed June 2025) added internationally licensed exchange capacity; Crypto.com agreed in December 2021 to acquire Nadex and the Small Exchange, a CFTC designated contract market, from IG Group. CME, ICE, Nasdaq, and Cboe could register as digital commodity exchanges directly, and Anchorage Digital holds an OCC national trust charter on the custody side.

There is no live application process; any future process will be written under the CLARITY Act if it passes the Senate. Preparation runs on three tracks: jurisdictional mapping of each product line against the House-passed CLARITY categories; obtaining antecedent licences (CFTC DCM, NFA membership, FINRA broker-dealer, SEC ATS) that the framework builds on; and operational build-out of audits, segregation, and qualified custody. Both FIT21 and CLARITY contemplate provisional operation via a notice-of-intent filing while agencies write final rules. Fees would be set by rule and have not been published.

FIT21 — US Digital Commodities and Securities Market Structure Act

Q: Statutory architecture

FIT21 (H.R. 4763, 118th Congress) is a five-title reallocation of jurisdiction. Title I defines digital asset, digital commodity, and restricted digital asset; Title II clarifies that a digital asset sold under an investment contract is not, of itself, a security in perpetuity; Title III creates SEC registration pathways for intermediaries in restricted digital assets; Title IV grants the CFTC exclusive spot-market jurisdiction over digital commodities and creates registration for digital commodity exchanges (new CEA Section 5i) and brokers and dealers (new CEA Section 4u); Title V contains innovation provisions including codification of FinHub and LabCFTC. The gating decentralisation test asks, among other criteria, whether any person can unilaterally alter the system and whether any issuer or affiliate holds 20 percent or more of the asset's voting power or units.

Q: License tiers and categories

On the CFTC side, digital commodity exchanges register under new CEA Section 5i and digital commodity brokers and dealers under new CEA Section 4u, with mandatory membership in a registered futures association and a notice-of-intent process (bill Sections 106-107) allowing provisional operation while rules are written. On the SEC side, Title III creates registration pathways for digital asset trading systems, brokers, and dealers handling restricted digital assets. The decentralisation test determines which perimeter applies: assets on qualifying decentralised systems are CFTC digital commodities; the rest remain SEC-regulated restricted digital assets with a pathway to later certification.

Q: Capital and operational requirements

The House-passed FIT21 text does not hard-code dollar capital floors; financial-resource and capital minimums are left to CFTC and SEC rulemaking, modelled on existing futures and securities core principles. Section 5i exchanges face core-principle obligations covering adequate financial resources, trade monitoring, listing standards, system safeguards, and public data reporting. Customer funds must be segregated with qualified custodians, brokers and dealers must join a registered futures association, and Bank Secrecy Act AML obligations apply. Restricted-digital-asset issuers face a scaled disclosure regime under the Securities Act. The CLARITY Act takes the same approach, leaving prudential detail to post-enactment rulemaking.

Q: Enforcement actions to date

There is no FIT21 enforcement because the bill never became law. The environment it targeted: the SEC's 2023 registration cases against Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, which unwound under the Atkins-led Commission — the Coinbase case was dismissed with prejudice by agreement in February 2025 (after Coinbase largely lost its motion to dismiss in March 2024), the Kraken case was dismissed in March 2025, and the Binance case was dismissed with prejudice by joint stipulation in May 2025. On the CFTC track, the November 2023 Binance resolution (2.7 billion dollars) and spot-market fraud actions under CEA Section 6(c)(1) showed the CFTC perimeter operating without registration architecture. State money-transmitter enforcement, most prominently under the NYDFS BitLicense, defines the patchwork the federal bills address.

Q: Comparison to peer frameworks

Against MiCA, FIT21 is more aggressive on jurisdictional clarity (a binary CFTC-or-SEC outcome via the decentralisation test) and lighter on prudential prescription (no white-paper regime, no stablecoin usage caps). A FIT21 registration operates nationwide but confers no cross-border passport, unlike MiCA's 27-state passport. Singapore's MAS PSA supervises a unified digital payment token service holistically; Hong Kong's SFC VATP regime imposes token-admission due diligence FIT21 lacks; Japan's PSA regime is more prescriptive operationally. The closest interaction is with the GENIUS Act, enacted July 2025: FIT21-style market-structure bills scope around payment stablecoins, which GENIUS regulates, leaving a perimeter focused on fungible-token spot markets.

Q: Open questions and pending changes

The open questions now attach to the CLARITY Act, which passed the House 294-134 on 17 July 2025, cleared Senate Banking 15-9 on 14 May 2026, and awaits a Senate floor vote as of July 2026. Passage requires roughly 60 votes, and the pre-August-recess window is widely treated as the last realistic gate this Congress. The blocking disputes are Trump-family conflict-of-interest provisions, law-enforcement objections to the bill's jurisdictional provisions, and stablecoin yield pass-through versus the GENIUS Act's interest prohibition. The scope of the DeFi exclusion from intermediary registration also remains contested.

By Data Engineering 2026-04-30 13 min read 2,520 words

Last reviewed: 2026-07-152,520 words13 min readBy DeFi Intel Research Desk

Executive summary

FIT21 is the first crypto market-structure bill in US history to clear a chamber of Congress with a bipartisan supermajority. The 279-136 House vote on 22 May 2024 was the proof-of-concept that a crypto statute could pass with seventy-one Democrats joining the Republican majority, and it set the template that GENIUS Act stablecoin legislation followed in 2025. The bill itself is a 200-plus-page rewrite of the Commodity Exchange Act and Securities Exchange Act that assigns spot-market authority over digital commodities to the CFTC, preserves SEC jurisdiction over restricted digital assets that fail a statutory decentralisation test, and creates a registration framework for digital-commodity exchanges under new CEA Section 5i and for digital-commodity brokers and dealers under new CEA Section 4u. FIT21 itself was never enacted: it died in the Senate at the end of the 118th Congress and was not reintroduced. Its successor in the 119th Congress is the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY Act, H.R. 3633), which carries forward FIT21's core architecture and passed the House 294-134 on 17 July 2025 with 78 Democrats in support. The Senate Banking Committee reported the CLARITY Act out 15-9 on 14 May 2026, and as of July 2026 the bill sits on the Senate legislative calendar with no floor vote yet scheduled. Operators should treat FIT21 as the architectural blueprint and the CLARITY Act as the live legislative vehicle for federal crypto market-structure law.

Statutory architecture

FIT21 (H.R. 4763, 118th Congress) is structured as a five-title reallocation of jurisdiction. Title I sets out the definitions: digital asset (a digital representation of value recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger), digital commodity (a digital asset whose underlying blockchain system qualifies as decentralised and which was acquired through an end-user distribution or on a registered venue), and restricted digital asset (a digital asset that does not meet the digital-commodity criteria and remains within SEC jurisdiction). Title II provides clarity for assets offered as part of an investment contract, codifying that a digital asset sold under an investment contract is not, of itself, a security in perpetuity. Title III creates the SEC-side registration pathways for trading systems, brokers, and dealers handling restricted digital assets. Title IV creates the CFTC regime, granting the Commission exclusive jurisdiction over spot markets in digital commodities and adding new Commodity Exchange Act registration categories: digital commodity exchanges under new Section 5i, and digital commodity brokers and dealers under new Section 4u. Title V contains innovation and technology provisions, including studies and the codification of the SEC's FinHub and the CFTC's LabCFTC. The gating mechanism is the decentralisation test. A blockchain system is decentralised if, among other criteria, no person has unilateral authority to materially alter its functioning, no person can unilaterally restrict others from using or participating in it, the asset has not been marketed as an investment, distributions in the preceding year were end-user distributions, and no issuer or affiliated person owned or directed the voting power of 20 percent or more of the asset's outstanding units. Issuers certify decentralisation to the SEC, which has a window to rebut the certification. The CLARITY Act, FIT21's 119th-Congress successor, retains this dual-regulator architecture while reworking the asset taxonomy around 'digital commodities' and 'investment contract assets' and adding a mature-blockchain-system test.

License tiers and categories

FIT21 creates new federal CFTC registration categories and new SEC-side pathways. On the CFTC side, the new CEA Section 5i authorises digital commodity exchanges to operate spot trading venues for digital commodities, and the new CEA Section 4u requires digital commodity brokers (who solicit or accept customer orders) and digital commodity dealers (who act as principal in digital-commodity transactions) to register and to become members of a registered futures association. Dual registration is expressly contemplated, and Sections 106-107 of the bill establish a notice-of-intent process allowing firms to operate provisionally while full registration rules are written. On the SEC side, Title III creates registration pathways for digital asset trading systems, digital asset brokers, and digital asset dealers handling restricted digital assets, layered onto the existing Exchange Act framework. The decentralisation test is the gating mechanism for which regulator's perimeter applies: a blockchain system qualifies as decentralised if no person has unilateral authority to materially alter it, no person can unilaterally restrict others from using it, the asset was not marketed as an investment, distributions in the preceding twelve months were end-user distributions, and no issuer or affiliated person owned or directed the voting power of 20 percent or more of the outstanding units. Assets on qualifying systems are digital commodities under CFTC jurisdiction; assets failing the criteria remain restricted digital assets under SEC jurisdiction with a continuing pathway to certification as the system decentralises.

Capital and operational requirements

FIT21 imports the existing futures and securities capital architecture rather than inventing a new prudential regime, and — unlike MiCA or the Hong Kong VATP rules — the House-passed text does not hard-code dollar capital floors; minimum financial-resource and capital requirements for digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers are left to CFTC rulemaking, modelled on the core principles that govern designated contract markets and futures intermediaries today. The bill's core-principle obligations for Section 5i exchanges include adequate financial resources, monitoring of trading activity, listing standards limiting venues to assets not readily susceptible to manipulation, system safeguards, and public reporting of trading data. Customer-protection provisions require segregation of customer funds and property with qualified custodians and impose disclosure and treatment-of-customer-asset rules on brokers and dealers, drawing on the existing CEA Section 4d segregation model. Registered brokers and dealers must join a registered futures association (in practice the NFA) and comply with its customer-disclosure and asset-protection rules, and all intermediaries remain subject to Bank Secrecy Act AML obligations as futures commission merchant-type financial institutions. On the SEC side, restricted-digital-asset issuers face a new disclosure regime of prescribed offering and periodic reports scaled to the issuer's activity, administered under the Securities Act rather than full Exchange Act reporting. The precise capital numbers that would apply in practice are therefore a rulemaking question, and the CLARITY Act takes the same approach: it directs the CFTC and SEC to write the prudential detail after enactment rather than fixing it in statute.

Notable licensees

Because FIT21 has not been enacted no firms hold registrations under it. Operator behaviour during the legislative pendency is itself the notable activity. Coinbase has restructured its US business explicitly in anticipation of dual CFTC-SEC registration: its acquisition of FairX in January 2022 and the launch of Coinbase Derivatives as a CFTC-licensed designated contract market were groundwork for a unified exchange-plus-broker architecture under a FIT21-style regime. Kraken acquired TradeStation Crypto in 2024 (bringing money-transmitter coverage across most US states) and closed its 1.5-billion-dollar acquisition of NinjaTrader, a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant, in May 2025, and is similarly positioned. Robinhood's acquisition of Bitstamp — announced June 2024 and closed June 2025 — gave it internationally licensed exchange capacity, and the firm has been among the most vocal in Hill testimony on market-structure architecture. Crypto.com obtained a CFTC-designated contract market through its acquisition of Nadex and the Small Exchange from IG Group (agreed December 2021). CME Group, ICE, Nasdaq, and Cboe are all positioned to register as digital commodity exchanges in their own right and have lobbied the bill substantially toward the existing futures-market template. On the SEC side, Anchorage Digital — holder of an OCC national trust charter — has positioned its federal charter as qualified-custodian infrastructure for the restricted-digital-asset perimeter. Fidelity Digital Assets, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton reach the same perimeter through existing SEC-registered subsidiaries. The conspicuous absence is the offshore-domiciled exchange cohort — Binance, Bybit, OKX, KuCoin — none of which has positioned for FIT21 registration, and several of which would face threshold ineligibility under the bill's bad-actor disqualifications drawn from the existing Securities Act Rule 506(d) framework.

Enforcement actions to date

Pre-enactment there is by definition no FIT21 enforcement, but two parallel tracks define the operating environment that FIT21 is meant to replace. The first is the SEC's enforcement programme against crypto firms it asserts violated the Securities Exchange Act through unregistered exchange or broker-dealer activity. The 2023 actions against Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken framed the policy debate that produced FIT21 in 2024, and the litigation outcomes — Coinbase's largely unsuccessful motion to dismiss in March 2024 followed by the SEC's agreed dismissal of the case with prejudice in February 2025, the SEC's dismissal of the Kraken case in March 2025, and the joint stipulation dismissing the Binance case with prejudice in May 2025 — define the legal posture that FIT21 was drafted to resolve. The second track is the CFTC's parallel enforcement programme. The CFTC's November 2023 resolution with Binance (2.7 billion dollars in penalty and disgorgement) and its line of spot-market fraud actions under CEA Section 6(c)(1) anti-fraud authority demonstrated that a CFTC perimeter was already operational pre-FIT21, just without registration architecture. State enforcement under existing money-transmitter regimes — most prominently NYDFS BitLicense enforcement, but also actions in California, Texas, and Washington — defines the cost of the patchwork that FIT21's federal preemption provisions would eliminate. The Atkins-era SEC under Chairman Paul Atkins, sworn in April 2025, materially scaled back the registration-based crypto enforcement programme, with the major exchange cases dismissed during 2025, though fraud cases continue to be pursued.

How to apply

Because FIT21 was never enacted, there is no live application process, and any future process will be written under the CLARITY Act if that bill passes the Senate. Operator preparation should proceed on three tracks. Track one is jurisdictional positioning: structuring the firm so that the activity-by-activity allocation between CFTC and SEC perimeters is clean, mapping every product line to the registration categories in the House-passed CLARITY text and identifying which products would route to which regulator under the decentralisation and maturity tests. Track two is registration foundation: obtaining the antecedent licences — CFTC designated contract market status, NFA membership, FINRA broker-dealer membership, SEC ATS authorisation — that the framework builds on rather than replaces. A firm with a live DCM and a live ATS in 2026 will face a far simpler transition than one starting from cold. Track three is operational build-out: security audits, segregated-account architecture, and qualified-custody arrangements of the kind the bills import as registration requirements. All three tracks have current real-world value regardless of the legislation's trajectory. Both FIT21 and the CLARITY Act contemplate provisional operation via a notice-of-intent filing while the agencies write final registration rules, so early filers would gain a transitional runway. Application fees and surcharges would be set by Commission rule rather than statute and have not been published; an all-in unified exchange-plus-broker-dealer registration build is realistically a multi-year project costing well into eight figures, comparable to a regional bank licensing project.

Comparison to peer frameworks

Against MiCA, FIT21 is structurally more aggressive on jurisdictional clarity (the decentralisation test produces a binary CFTC-or-SEC outcome) and structurally less aggressive on prudential rules (no equivalent of MiCA's Article 23 stablecoin transaction cap, no equivalent of MiCA's white-paper regime for non-stablecoin tokens). Against MiCA's twenty-seven-state passport, FIT21 offers a single federal registration that operates nationwide, though it does not extend abroad. Against Singapore's MAS Payment Services Act, FIT21 is markedly more activity-specific and produces clearer regulator-by-regulator allocation; MAS authorises a unified Digital Payment Token Service and supervises holistically. Against UK's FCA cryptoasset regime, FIT21 is a true market-structure statute while the FCA register remains an AML-CFT permission pending the FSMA 2023 RAO transition. Against the Hong Kong VATP regime, FIT21's asset-level decentralisation test is more permissive than the SFC's token-admission due-diligence requirements. Against Japan's PSA crypto-exchange regime, FIT21 leaves capital floors to CFTC and SEC rulemaking rather than fixing them in statute, and its operational rules are less prescriptive than the JFSA's pre-listing review. The most consequential comparison is against the GENIUS Act stablecoin regime that did pass: FIT21 deliberately scopes around stablecoins (which are GENIUS-regulated) and deliberately scopes around non-fungible tokens (which the bill expressly excludes from the digital-commodity definition), leaving a focused perimeter on fungible-token spot markets that closely tracks the existing CFTC-SEC division for traditional commodities and securities.

Open questions and pending changes

The open questions now attach to the CLARITY Act, FIT21's successor vehicle. First, Senate floor timing: the bill cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 on 14 May 2026 under Chair Tim Scott, with Democrats Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks crossing over, and sits on the Senate legislative calendar as of July 2026 with no cloture motion filed. Reaching sixty votes requires several more Democratic votes than the committee tally produced, and the window before the August 2026 recess is widely treated as the last realistic gate for passage this Congress. Second, the substantive disputes blocking those votes: conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions aimed at the Trump family's cryptocurrency holdings (the July 2026 financial disclosure reported roughly 1.4 billion dollars of crypto-related income in 2025), law-enforcement objections that the bill's jurisdictional provisions could impair criminal investigations, and the fight over whether exchanges may pass through stablecoin yield notwithstanding the GENIUS Act's prohibition on issuer-paid interest. Third, DeFi treatment: the House-passed CLARITY text carves non-custodial, protocol-level DeFi activity out of intermediary registration, but the exclusion's boundaries remain among the most contested provisions on the Senate side. Operators should also watch the SEC's parallel rulemaking agenda under the Atkins-era Commission, which could deliver portions of the market-structure perimeter administratively, and the OCC's processing of national trust charter applications from crypto firms. Failure to pass the CLARITY Act by year-end 2026 would push market-structure legislation into the next Congress.

Watch points

CLARITY Act Senate floor vote — window before the August 2026 recess is the key gate
Cloture math: several more Democratic votes needed beyond the 15-9 committee tally
Trump-family conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions
Law-enforcement objections to the bill's jurisdictional provisions
Stablecoin yield pass-through vs the GENIUS Act interest prohibition
Scope of the DeFi exclusion from intermediary registration
Parallel SEC rulemaking under the Atkins-era Commission absorbing portions of the perimeter

TL;DR

House-passed 279-136 in May 2024 but never enacted — FIT21 died in the 118th-Congress Senate. Its successor, the CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633), passed the House 294-134 in July 2025, cleared Senate Banking 15-9 in May 2026, and awaits a Senate floor vote as of July 2026. The framework assigns CFTC spot-market authority over decentralised digital commodities and preserves SEC jurisdiction over the rest.

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Sources

Legislative status verified against Congress.gov and Senate Banking Committee records, 15 July 2026.