What about the American consumer?

Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:

• Alex Tapscott on the stalling of the CLARITY Act and how it’s impacting the average American consumer.
• Aisha Hunt writes that crypto will grow by upgrading Wall Street’s trusted products rather than replacing them.
• Top headlines institutions should pay attention to by Helene Braun
• “RWA Perp Volume by Category: Equities Overtake Commodities” in Chart of the Week

-Alexandra Levis

Expert Insights

What about the American consumer?

By Alex Tapscott, CEO, CMCC Global Capital Markets

The little guy is getting lost in the political horse-trading around the CLARITY Act.

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee recently advanced the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, legislation that, if enacted, could finally establish clear rules for digital assets in the United States. The bill has survived months of bipartisan negotiations and horse trading between banking interests and upstart fintech companies.

A bipartisan compromise brokered by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) broke a log-jam that had slowed down the bill’s progress. In the end, the banks got most of what they wanted in this “deal”: the legislation explicitly prevents fintech platforms from treating stablecoins, digital assets backed by dollars, as interest bearing accounts, while still permitting them to pay rewards and bonuses, as banks and credit card issuers do.

That should have ended the debate. Yet banking lobby groups are demanding tighter restrictions to eliminate many forms of consumer rewards altogether. Clearly, they seek to squash this already compromised bill before a full Senate vote, so that it never reaches the Resolute Desk.

Lost amid the political wrangling of crypto and banking interests is the average American consumer.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Americans paid roughly $5.8 billion in overdraft fees in 2023, even after years of industry efforts to reduce so-called “junk fees.” Overdraft charges disproportionately hit financially vulnerable households, with nearly 80% of fees concentrated among 9% of accounts. And then there are account minimums, wire charges and payment delays, which add friction. Meanwhile, the average savings rate is only 0.38%.

Consumers want financial services to move faster, cost less and earn them more.

Stablecoins are gaining popularity because they herald a world where digital dollars move across the internet as cheaply and seamlessly as a WhatsApp message. They can lower remittance costs, improve access to digital commerce, expedite real-time payments and create new ways for consumers to save, spend and transact online.

And Americans are asking for CLARITY because many already use these tools. According to the Crypto Council for Innovation, one in five American adults now owns cryptocurrency. That’s roughly 68.5 million people. Stablecoins are among the fastest-growing categories of digital assets, particularly among younger consumers, immigrants, freelancers and underserved communities seeking faster and cheaper financial tools. Four in five merchants believe accepting crypto could help attract new customers, while 73% of small business owners expect crypto payments to grow.

That’s what makes this debate so politically mystifying. For years, progressives argued that concentrated financial power harmed consumers and Main Street. They criticized large banks for extracting rents while lobbying against regulations that diluted bank influence. Those critiques were often correct. Today some of those progressives, like Elizabeth Warren, who championed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are now defending banking profits against a technology that could inject real competition into financial services and empower consumers and small businesses.

Congress should pass CLARITY in its current form to benefit American consumers and preserve American competitiveness and leadership in the next era of financial technology. This lead is by no means assured: today, 88% of global crypto trading volume occurs on non-U.S.-based exchanges, while foreign-issued stablecoins account for 75% of stablecoin volume. Over the past decade, the U.S. share of global crypto developers has fallen from 38% to just 19%.

Do American politicians want their country to continue leading, or do they prefer watching such financial transformation from the sidelines?

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration helped usher in the commercial internet through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a bipartisan effort expanding innovation and competition. Now, Congress has an opportunity to unleash the new internet of value by passing CLARITY.

Under GENIUS and CLARITY, stablecoin issuers must meet strong reserve requirements, transparency obligations, anti-money laundering standards, cybersecurity rules and consumer protections. Sensible public policy will unleash investment and innovation, as it did in the internet era.

This story need not end in conflict between banks and blockchains. Incumbents can just as easily embrace blockchain and its various benefits, from real-time global settlement and tokenized assets, to new forms of on-chain lending, payments, savings and commerce.

The question is whether lawmakers will vote to lead this next technological revolution and advance the interests of American consumers or cede the future to entrenched interests.

Principled Perspectives

Why Crypto May Need ETFs More Than ETFs Need Crypto

By Aisha Hunt, founder of Kelley Hunt, PLLC

Crypto spent its first decade trying to replace Wall Street. Its next trillion dollars may come from partnering with it. The first wave of tokenization focused on creating new assets, new venues and new systems outside traditional finance. Some of that innovation mattered. Much of it struggled with the same problem: markets do not scale on technology alone. They scale on trust, liquidity and distribution. That reality favors ETFs.

The ETF wrapper became one of the most successful financial products of the modern era because it solved practical investor problems at scale: low-cost access, transparency, intraday liquidity, operational simplicity and broad distribution across brokerage platforms and advisory channels.

Those advantages took decades to build. Tokenization does not erase them. In fact, it may amplify them. If blockchain rails can be integrated into ETFs, investors may not have to choose between innovation and protection. They could gain exposure to familiar products with the potential benefits of faster settlement, programmable ownership, collateral mobility and broader digital interoperability, all inside a structure already trusted by institutions, advisors and retail investors.

That is a far bigger commercial opportunity than asking trillions of dollars to migrate into unfamiliar vehicles. This is why one underappreciated development matters. On January 21, 2026, F/m Investments LLC and The RBB Fund, Inc. filed what is believed to be the first exemptive application by an ETF issuer seeking to tokenize shares of an exchange-traded fund, TBIL, the U.S. Treasury 3 Month Bill ETF. The proposal would record ownership on a permissioned blockchain ledger while preserving the same fund, same economics, same exchange listing and same regulatory framework. The application remains pending before the SEC, and there can be no assurance relief will be granted. That may sound like a niche legal filing. It is not. It is a test of whether capital markets modernization happens inside the regulatory perimeter or outside it.

That distinction matters to investors because the next major on-chain growth category may not be speculative tokens. It may be trusted yield, usable collateral and regulated exposure. Stablecoins already demonstrated the demand for digitally native dollars. The next logical step is digitally native instruments backed by real portfolios, real governance and real investor protections.

That is where tokenized ETFs could become powerful.

Imagine Treasury exposure that can plug into next-generation collateral networks. Imagine ETF shares that remain within familiar regulatory guardrails while operating on more modern rails. Imagine advisors and institutions accessing blockchain efficiency without having to underwrite experimental structures.

The first tokenization narrative was “replace incumbents.” The stronger narrative may be “upgrade incumbents.” That does not diminish crypto; it commercializes it.

For regulators, tokenized ETFs may offer a pragmatic path forward: enable innovation where investor protections remain intact, rather than pushing demand into parallel channels with greater uncertainty. For exchanges, custodians, brokers and market makers, it could create a new infrastructure layer around products investors already understand.

For issuers, it may become a race. The firms that combine trusted wrappers, credible assets and functional on-chain rails could capture disproportionate flows. And for allocators, the signal may be simple: blockchain technology is becoming less about novelty and more about plumbing.That is usually when real adoption begins.

The broader lesson is that distribution often beats disruption:

Who already has trusted wrappers?

Who already has liquidity?

Who already has access to advisors, retirement assets and institutions?

Who can bridge old rails and new rails fastest?

Those questions point toward ETFs.

The next trillion dollars of tokenized assets may not come from inventing something entirely new; they may come from upgrading what already works. Crypto’s first era was about building outside the system. Its next era may be about powering the system.

Headlines of the week

By Helene Braun

A few of crypto’s biggest debates converged this past week as Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR) sold bitcoin to fund preferred stock dividends, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon escalated his fight against yield-bearing stablecoins during the CLARITY Act debate, and Citi projected tokenized securities could grow into a $5.5 trillion market by 2030, driven by rising demand for onchain Treasuries and tokenized stocks.

Chart of the Week

RWA Perp Volume by Category: Equities Overtake Commodities (excluding oil)

RWA perps run ~$45–60 billion/week, and flow is rotating out of commodities into equities. Equities roughly tripled to ~$18 billion and just overtook the commodities (excluding oil) block, while oil faded after its April macro spike. This implies that crypto-venue derivatives are increasingly used for 24/7 equity exposure, with commodities now the episodic, event-driven slice.

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Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc., CoinDesk Indices or its owners and affiliates.