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State of Play’s TL;DR
- The Indian Gaming Association says a revised Clarity Act still fails to protect tribal gaming rights.
- The organization also says it does not limit CFTC authority.
A revised version of the Clarity Act is heading into a key Senate procedural vote, but the Indian Gaming Association says the latest draft still does not protect tribal gaming rights.
Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis released the new 630-page version of the bill before a scheduled cloture vote.
Lummis said the revision includes more than 114 provisions requested by Democratic lawmakers.
Tribal gaming groups say the core problem remains
Indian Gaming Association Chairman David Bean said: “Indian Country strongly opposes the revised version of the Clarity Act,” arguing that the bill’s updated decentralized finance language does not fix the group’s central concerns.
Bean said the proposal still does nothing to restrict the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He also criticized what he described as expanding CFTC authority while prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket continue offering gaming-like contracts.
The IGA wants explicit bill text confirming that state and tribal gaming laws – including the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act – are not pre-empted by federal commodities law. Bean also said designated contract markets should not be allowed to list contracts tied to sports betting or casino games.
Why this matters for the broader gambling industry
This dispute goes beyond tribal operators. If federal commodities law is seen as overriding state or tribal gaming rules, it could reshape the boundary between gambling regulation and event-contract markets.
That is why the bill is getting attention from gaming stakeholders even though much of its text deals with digital assets and decentralized finance. The unresolved question is whether Congress will clearly wall off traditional gaming regulation from CFTC-supervised markets.
The immediate next step is this week’s cloture vote. If the Senate invokes cloture, lawmakers can move to debate and amend the bill. If cloture fails, the measure is effectively dead for this Congress.
Based on reporting by Kayode Kehinde for Iredell Free News.
