Key Takeaways:
- CLARITY Act Stalls as Crypto Regulation Shifts Back to Agencies
- SEC Opens a Path for Secondary Trading of Tokenized Equities
- U.S. Crypto Markets Move Toward Onchain Perpetuals
CLARITY Act Stalls as Crypto Regulation Shifts Back to Agencies
The U.S. Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, with the procedural vote falling well short of the 60 votes required to proceed.
The result marks a setback for the most significant attempt in years to establish a comprehensive federal framework for digital asset market structure.
The failure was particularly notable because several Democrats who had previously supported the legislation ultimately voted against it, while Republicans also opposed the bill over disagreements including stablecoin yield provisions.
The vote can technically be revisited later in the current Congress, but the near-term prospects for passage appear limited.
The setback does not necessarily imply a reversal in U.S. crypto policy.
In the absence of legislation, regulators are increasingly becoming the primary source of market-structure development, with recent actions from the SEC and CFTC providing new pathways for tokenized securities and decentralized financial infrastructure (more below).
The longer-term uncertainty is more significant: Congress can establish rules, market boundaries, and consumer protections that agencies cannot fully replicate.
For now, however, the combination of supportive regulators and continued institutional investment means that the U.S. digital asset market is likely to keep developing even without CLARITY.
SEC Opens a Path for Secondary Trading of Tokenized Equities
The SEC has created a long-awaited regulatory pathway for the secondary trading of tokenized U.S. equities.
Its five-year innovation exemption allows qualifying tokenized securities venues to operate permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools without being treated as traditional exchanges, while also providing relief for certain liquidity providers from dealer registration.
Importantly, the framework requires tokenized securities to represent the actual underlying shares, including their economic and governance rights, while allowing trading to take place on public, permissionless blockchains subject to access controls.
The framework therefore combines public blockchain infrastructure with permissioned participation.
The significance extends beyond regulatory relief for a handful of tokenization platforms.
The exemption addresses one of the key bottlenecks holding back onchain equities: the absence of a clear framework for secondary-market liquidity.
It also establishes an important distinction between genuine tokenized securities and products that merely provide economic exposure through wrappers, derivatives, or linked securities.
Combined with the broader build-out of tokenization infrastructure by institutions such as DTCC, the SEC's move suggests that tokenized equities are moving from an infrastructure experiment toward a functioning component of capital markets.
U.S. Crypto Markets Move Toward Onchain Perpetuals
The failure of CLARITY is also shaping how decentralized trading venues approach the U.S. market.
Payward, Kraken's parent company, plans to offer U.S. clients onchain perpetual futures through Hyperliquid's proposed HIP-3 framework, which would allow deployers to add controlled allowlists to otherwise permissionless markets.
The model could provide a bridge between Hyperliquid's onchain market infrastructure and U.S. regulatory requirements, although the offering remains subject to regulatory approval.
At the same time, Nasdaq's planned $100 million investment in Payward and its broader partnership around market surveillance highlight the growing convergence between traditional financial infrastructure and crypto-native trading venues.
Robinhood is pursuing a more conventional route, announcing perpetual futures for eligible U.S. users through its regulated Bitstamp platform rather than relying on a decentralized venue.
The divergence between the two approaches is revealing.
Crypto-native platforms are attempting to adapt decentralized infrastructure to regulatory requirements, while established financial platforms are using regulated entities to bring similar products onchain.
Both approaches point toward the same broader trend: derivatives, equities, and other financial markets are increasingly moving toward 24/7 digital infrastructure, but the question of how decentralized venues can serve regulated U.S. users remains unresolved.
Crypto Security Losses Highlight the Weaknesses Around the Key
Crypto suffered another month of significant security losses, with Bitget losing approximately $388 million from hot and warm wallets and the Liquid Network losing roughly $320 million in L-BTC.
In both cases, the critical vulnerability was not the underlying cryptography itself.
Bitget's attackers reportedly exploited third-party security infrastructure to obtain elevated credentials and submit fraudulent withdrawal commands, while the Liquid incident involved a vulnerability in the infrastructure surrounding its peg-out process.
Together, the incidents reinforce a broader shift in the security landscape: "sophisticated attackers are increasingly targeting the systems, permissions, and intermediaries surrounding private keys rather than attempting to break the cryptographic layer itself."
The pattern is familiar across DeFi and centralized infrastructure.
Earlier this year, the $290 million KelpDAO exploit demonstrated how a bridge vulnerability could propagate through lending markets and create systemic consequences well beyond the original loss.
The lesson is increasingly relevant as crypto infrastructure becomes more interconnected: security cannot be assessed at the smart-contract or private-key level alone.
Custodians, bridges, wallet-management systems, oracle infrastructure, and third-party security providers all become part of the effective attack surface.
The industry is making progress in protecting core cryptographic assets, but the growing complexity of the surrounding infrastructure creates new points of failure.
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