By Hyunsu Jung
The digital asset industry has spent years calling for greater regulatory clarity in the United States. While innovation has accelerated, the legal framework governing cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets and decentralized finance has struggled to keep pace. Companies have often been forced to interpret decades-old securities laws in the context of technologies that did not exist when those laws were written.
The Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act has come closer than most of its predecessors. The House passed the legislation in 2025 by a bipartisan vote, the Senate Banking Committee advanced its version this year, and lawmakers have continued negotiating a broader framework that would divide oversight of digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Although unclear if CLARITY will pass this year, it would be a mistake to conclude that U.S. crypto regulation will remain frozen in place.
Even without CLARITY, the SEC, CFTC and banking regulators are already using existing authorities to make some of the most consequential changes to the treatment of digital assets in the United States. The result is an unusual regulatory moment: Congress may fail to deliver a comprehensive statute even as the financial system around crypto becomes substantially more institutionalized.
The SEC offered a clear example on August 18. Its proposed “Regulation Crypto Assets” would create a tailored framework for certain crypto-related investment contract offerings, including new pathways for issuers to raise capital under federal securities laws and, under specified conditions, for a crypto asset to become “delinked” from the investment contract through which it was originally sold. The proposal builds on the Commission’s March 2026 interpretation distinguishing a crypto asset itself from the securities transaction that may have surrounded its initial sale. This is a meaningful development that builds on the Commission’s earlier interpretation and potentially opens the path for accelerating capital formation for crypto development.
For years, one of the industry’s central challenges has been determining whether a token used to finance the development of a network could remain effectively trapped inside the securities regulatory framework even after the network became functional and the token developed independent utility. The SEC is now attempting to create a clearer path for crypto capital formation while preserving disclosure and antifraud protections.
The CFTC is moving just as aggressively: late last year, the agency opened a pathway for listed spot crypto products to trade on CFTC-registered futures exchanges. It subsequently launched a pilot framework allowing assets including bitcoin, ether and qualifying payment stablecoins to be used as collateral in regulated derivatives markets, while providing guidance for tokenized real-world collateral such as U.S. Treasuries. This year, the Commission approved a “true” bitcoin perpetual futures contract and provided a path for registered exchanges to convert certain perpetual-style products into true perpetual futures.
Together, these developments begin to resemble pieces of a future market structure: regulated spot crypto, perpetual derivatives, tokenized collateral, stablecoin-based settlement and potentially 24/7 markets operating inside the existing federal system.
Bank regulators are moving in parallel, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reaffirming that national banks can provide crypto custody, participate in certain stablecoin activities and operate nodes on distributed ledgers. The FDIC has said supervised banks may engage in permissible crypto activities without first obtaining specific agency approval. And Congress has already enacted the GENIUS Act, providing a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins.
For institutions, these changes matter. A bank deciding whether to build digital-asset custody, an asset manager evaluating tokenized funds, or a trading firm investing in 24/7 market infrastructure increasingly has regulatory pathways that did not exist several years ago. More importantly, they highlight that crypto adoption will not wait on a single piece of legislation.
But that should not understate CLARITY’s importance. What agencies can accomplish through interpretation, rulemaking, exemptive relief and existing registration frameworks is fundamentally different from what Congress can establish in statute. An agency interpretation can be revised. A no-action position can be withdrawn. Rules can be challenged in court or rewritten by future commissions. Congress cannot eliminate political or regulatory risk, but legislation creates a much stronger foundation for companies making long-duration capital commitments.
For example, one of the most important gaps remains the spot market for digital commodities. The CFTC has long possessed derivatives jurisdiction and anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority over commodity spot markets, but it has not historically had the same comprehensive supervisory authority over spot crypto intermediaries that applies to regulated securities or derivatives markets.
The current Senate framework would establish registered digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers under the CFTC, creating requirements around customer assets, capital, conflicts of interest, market surveillance, disclosures and other core protections. It would also establish more durable boundaries between SEC and CFTC jurisdiction and address difficult questions involving decentralized finance, software developers and self-custody.
Those provisions matter because the next stage of crypto adoption will be driven less by whether a particular regulator is friendly to digital assets and more by whether large institutions can rely on the rules remaining stable across administrations. This is happening as crypto-native infrastructure continues to become further integrated into the existing financial system.
Stablecoins are moving toward regulated payments. Tokenization is bringing securities and collateral onto blockchain rails. Derivatives regulators are adapting to perpetual contracts and continuous trading. Banks are becoming more comfortable providing custody and other digital-asset services. In that environment, a failure to pass CLARITY would not return the United States to the regulatory landscape of 2022 or 2023. Too much has already changed.
Instead, the country could arrive at something more complicated: a substantially more permissive and sophisticated crypto market built on a patchwork of existing statutes, agency interpretations, exemptions, supervisory guidance and state regimes. That framework may be enough to support significant near-term growth and even allow regulators to implement much of the practical modernization the industry has sought. But questions around the long-term durability of that framework would remain and hinder the ability for major institutions to invest at the scale needed to meaningfully allow long-term growth. Asset managers, exchanges, custodians and financial technology companies ultimately allocate capital based not only on regulatory permission, but on regulatory durability.
Thus CLARITY is not the only path to sweeping regulatory change, and its failure would not mean regulatory paralysis. The SEC, CFTC and banking regulators have already demonstrated that they can reshape the industry’s regulatory perimeter using the authority they possess today, the evolution of U.S digital asset regulation will only continue.
About the Author
Hyunsu Jung is the CEO of Hyperion DeFi (NASDAQ: HYPD), leading the company’s treasury strategy, DeFi integrations and overall corporate direction. He joined the leadership team and board in June 2025. He previously served as a Portfolio Manager at DARMA Capital, a CFTC-and NFA-registered digital asset manager, where he oversaw more than $1 billion in Ethereum and developed blockchain-based strategies that now guide Hyperion’s digital asset treasury model. Earlier in his career, he worked in EY-Parthenon’s consulting practice, advising enterprise clients on finance and digital transformation initiatives.