Representative French Hill, R-Ark., said agency-level crypto rules cannot substitute for the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill he has championed in the House, according to a report by Cryptonews.net. His statement pushes back against the view that regulators can resolve the industry's legal ambiguity on their own.

Hill chairs the House Financial Services Committee, the panel with jurisdiction over securities markets and the legislative home of the CLARITY Act — the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The bill is designed to draw a regulatory boundary between the SEC and the CFTC by defining when a digital asset is a security and when it trades as a commodity.

Why does Hill think rulemaking falls short?

The core of Hill's position is structural. Agency rules, however detailed, remain subordinate to statute. A future administration can reinterpret them, and courts can narrow them. Only legislation, under this argument, delivers the durable legal certainty that digital-asset firms say they need before committing capital to the U.S. market.

That argument has defined the market-structure debate in Washington for two years. Crypto firms have complained that overlapping claims by the SEC and the CFTC left them unable to determine which disclosure regime applies to a token at issuance versus secondary trading. The CLARITY Act targets precisely that gap.

What would the CLARITY Act change?

The bill would codify a division of labor between the two agencies. In broad terms:

• The SEC would retain authority over digital assets that qualify as investment contracts or securities at issuance.
• The CFTC would gain clearer jurisdiction over secondary-market trading of assets once they are sufficiently decentralized.
• Issuers would face defined disclosure obligations tied to the stage of the asset's lifecycle.

The bill advanced through the House Financial Services Committee, which Hill chairs, and passed the House in 2025 with bipartisan support. Its fate in the Senate has been less certain, where rival approaches and procedural constraints have slowed action.

What are the operational consequences?

For trading platforms, the stakes are concrete. A statutory boundary would determine which registration pathway an exchange pursues, which custody rules apply, and whether a broker-dealer can treat a token as a securities asset. Without it, firms continue to structure operations defensively, often offshore.

For regulators, Hill's statement signals that Congress — or at least the House committee he leads — does not intend to defer to agency guidance as a final settlement of the jurisdiction question. That matters for any SEC or CFTC initiative that touches token classification.

What comes next?

The CLARITY Act's path runs through the Senate, where market-structure legislation has faced competing drafts and a crowded calendar. Hill's remark suggests the House intends to keep legislative pressure on rather than accept regulatory fixes. The practical test will be whether the Senate takes up the bill in the current session or leaves digital-asset market structure to agency rulemaking — an outcome Hill has now explicitly rejected as insufficient.