U.S. lawmakers are voting on the CLARITY Act on Thursday, a major crypto market structure bill that includes a little-noticed NFT safe harbor provision that could reshape how collectibles and secondary NFT trading are treated under U.S. securities law.
While most attention is focused on stablecoins and the jurisdiction between the SEC and CFTC, Section 602 — “Safe Harbor for Nonfungible Tokens” — is attracting significant attention from the NFT collector community and marketplace operators.
Committee Vote Puts NFTs in Focus
The Senate Banking Committee is conducting a markup and voting on the CLARITY Act, one of the largest crypto bills introduced in Washington in 2026.
🚨 WATCH: Chairman @SenatorTimScott leads the Senate Banking Committee in a historic markup of the CLARITY Act, legislation to establish clear rules of the road for digital assets. https://t.co/wlHj2jcAEF
— U.S. Senate Banking Committee GOP (@BankingGOP) May 14, 2026
The bill focuses on building a clearer framework for digital assets, including dividing oversight responsibilities between the SEC and CFTC. However, as the vote took place, an NFT-related provision began to attract major attention from the community after the draft of the bill circulated on X.
Specifically, Section 602 of the bill directly addresses NFTs and states that the offer, sale, transfer, or resale of an NFT will not automatically constitute a securities transaction merely because the asset exists on a blockchain or has trading value on the secondary market.
This is one of the rare instances where the U.S. Congress has included NFTs in market structure legislation with relatively specific language instead of only mentioning digital assets in general terms.
The NFT Safe Harbor
According to the current draft of the CLARITY Act, the bill defines NFTs as digital assets that are “individually identifiable” and not interchangeable like fungible tokens.
Section 602. Source: U.S. Senate Committee
The safe harbor is designed for many common use cases, such as collectibles, artworks, gaming items, memberships, loyalty assets, and ticketing systems. The most notable point is that the draft attempts to separate NFT collectibles from the group of assets typically viewed as investment contracts under securities law.
Previously, this issue has always been one of the biggest gray areas of the NFT market in the U.S. Even though most NFTs function like collectibles or access assets, the market still faced the risk of being pulled into the securities framework if creators were deemed to be promoting expectations of profit from secondary trading.
The CLARITY Act does not declare that NFTs are “not securities.” Instead, the bill attempts to limit NFTs from being by default considered securities just because their value may increase over time or is tied to the reputation and activities of the creator.
Why Collectors Care
For NFT collectors, the biggest problem for years has not been the artwork or the community, but the legal uncertainty surrounding secondary trading activities.
In the past two years, many NFT marketplaces and Web3 startups have operated under greater legal pressure following a series of enforcement actions from the SEC. OpenSea confirmed receiving a Wells notice from the SEC in 2024, while many other NFT projects were also sued related to the sale of unregistered securities.
This has caused many platforms to restrict the deployment of new products in the U.S. or reduce exposure to certain types of highly speculative NFTs. For collectors, this means lower liquidity, less marketplace support, and more unpredictable legal risks around buying, selling, or transferring NFTs.
If Section 602 remains intact in subsequent rounds, collectors could benefit from a clearer framework for the resale of NFT collectibles, especially on the secondary market. Marketplace operators may also have a clearer legal basis to handle collectibles or utility NFTs without having to default to viewing every transaction as having securities implications.
This section is also particularly important for gaming and membership-based NFT systems — sectors that have been at a standstill in terms of expansion in the U.S. due to prolonged legal uncertainty.
Not a Blanket Protection
The current draft still excludes many cases with clearer financial investment elements, including fractionalized NFTs or assets representing economic interests and beneficial ownership claims.
Additionally, the bill’s exception clauses show that mass-minted NFT collections with a high degree of interchangeability may still face securities scrutiny in certain cases.
This is particularly noteworthy because a large portion of the NFT market in the 2021–2022 period operated closer to a speculative token market than a traditional collectibles market.
The CLARITY Act also does not eliminate the Howey Test. If an NFT transaction still fully meets the criteria of an investment contract under U.S. law, the SEC can still argue that the asset falls within the scope of securities law.
What Comes After the Vote
Today’s vote does not yet mean the CLARITY Act will become law. The bill can still be amended in subsequent rounds before heading to the Senate floor and broader legislative steps.
However, the fact that NFTs were included directly in market structure legislation shows that U.S. lawmakers are beginning to approach NFTs as a distinct asset class instead of grouping them with speculative crypto tokens.
If this trend continues, the debate around NFTs in the U.S. could gradually shift from the question of whether all NFTs are securities to identifying which types of NFTs truly function as investment products — a change that could directly affect how marketplaces, gaming platforms, and membership-based systems operate in the coming years.
