Senate Agriculture Committee Advances Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act
The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee advanced a bill creating a CFTC-centered framework for digital-commodity spot markets, moving federal Bitcoin market-structure legislation another step through Congress.
On January 29, 2026, the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry advanced the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act. The bill would give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission new authority over digital-commodity spot markets and establish a registration framework for intermediaries, customer-fund segregation, conflict-of-interest protections and coordinated rulemaking with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The proposal was broader than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin sits at the center of the digital-commodity category in U.S. policy debates. A CFTC spot-market regime would directly affect the exchanges and intermediaries through which U.S. customers trade Bitcoin. The committee described the measure as building on the House-passed CLARITY Act and incorporating provisions negotiated with Senate Democrats, although the broader market-structure effort remained politically contested.
The historical event is the committee advancement, not enactment of a final law. That procedural accuracy matters: January 29 showed meaningful legislative progress toward a federal spot-market structure for Bitcoin and other digital commodities without implying that Congress had completed the framework.