Senate Republicans circulated an updated CLARITY Act draft on September 10 that changes how the proposed crypto market-structure framework would treat decentralized finance and federal credit unions. The revisions remain proposed legislation, not requirements already in force.

Reporter Eleanor Terrett said the changes would require non-decentralized DeFi protocols to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She also reported that the DeFi provisions would be limited to spot or cash digital-commodity transactions, an important boundary for interpreting the proposal's scope.

According to Bitcoin Magazine's account of the draft, an application would fail the decentralization test if someone could control or materially alter its functionality, if it did not operate solely under pre-established transparent encoded rules, or if someone could restrict or censor its use.

For DeFi developers, those reported criteria put the focus on actual control over a protocol rather than its branding. Administrative powers and restrictions on access would therefore be relevant to assessing whether a system qualifies as decentralized under the proposed language.

The credit-union provision would allow a federal credit union to use digital assets or distributed-ledger systems to carry out activities it is otherwise legally authorized to perform, Bitcoin Magazine reported. That is a technology-use clarification, not an unrestricted expansion of permitted financial services.

Punchbowl News reporter Brendan Pedersen said a Senate vote was set for September 15, while emphasizing that the text was not yet bipartisan. The immediate development is a revised negotiating draft; neither its circulation nor a scheduled vote establishes that the bill will become law.