coindesk.com
In the weeks the Senate spent not passing the CLARITY Act, the largest institutions in American finance kept moving onchain. JPMorgan tokenized ETF holdings through the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporations (DTCC) production pilot, and more than 50 firms, among them BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, have signed on to tokenize stocks and Treasuries through the same infrastructure. BlackRock's CEO calls tokenization a way to "update the plumbing of the financial system.” The matter before Congress has stopped being about crypto.
If you run a traditional desk and treat CLARITY as a problem for the digital asset industry rather than your own, consider 2008. A new instrument grew up fast, inside the regulated system, on rules that had never been stress-tested, and when it broke the loss did not stay where it started. It reached firms that never touched a subprime mortgage and erased some $17 trillion in household wealth.
Randi Abernethy is the Head of Clearing and Group Risk at Bullish Exchange. She testified on the CLARITY Act before a House Financial Services subcommittee in July 2026. Read her full congressional testimony here.
The parallel is not that tokenized assets are the next subprime; it is that a shock travels through shared plumbing whether or not you touched what broke. The wiring is no different now: stablecoins alone hold well over $100 billion dollars in Treasury bills, and if a large stablecoin breaks and is forced to sell, the shock lands in the funding markets a traditional desk relies on every morning. Federal Reserve staff have flagged the risk; it nearly happened in 2023, when a Circle’s USDC briefly lost its peg because its reserves sat in a failing bank. International bodies like the IMF warn that such a shock would now travel faster than in 2008, because these markets are volatile, without clearing requirements there is no clearinghouse to contain a default before it spreads. The financial machinery is being rebuilt on rules that are not yet law, and when the first crisis reaches it, the loss will not ask whether your desk went onchain.
The bill has backers well beyond crypto: Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Franklin Templeton have all urged Congress to pass it, arguing clear rules would protect investors. Its critics counter that the rules are too soft, and that argument deserves a hearing. A bill like CLARITY writes the binding frame required for nation-wide investor protection into federal law, ensuring firms are supervised by the federal agencies, setting out key protections such as the segregation of customer assets, conflict of interest management, capital adequacy and transparency, and leaves the details to rulemaking, in the same way that Dodd-Frank set the architecture and the agencies spent years filling it in. Whether to make any of it law at all is the question the Senate left unanswered this week, and from here the calendar only hardens: a thin window in September, then an election year.