CoinDesk

This morning after the failure of the Clarity Act, I remembered the first real conversation I ever had about the future of blockchain and smart contracts in summer of 2013. @dwr said to me that he could envision a world where the stock markets moved onto public blockchains. Seemed crazy but not impossible. I was headed to go run the largest stock market in the world, the NYSE. I invested $10m in Coinbase as a bit of a hedge and to make sure I wasn’t missing a big trend. The Clarity Act originally came about when crypto volumes and the number of interesting tokens were booming. Let’s face it, we all thought we were headed towards a world with tons of important coins. Today the future of pure crypto is more circumscribed: bitcoin, a couple dozen important layer 1’s/2’s and a handful of productive projects. But the future of blockchain technology is far bigger and more interesting than most people foresaw even a year ago. In particular, tokenized securities including equity and debt are moving to public blockchains. The current projections are all way too low. There will be $150 trillion of assets on chain in 2035 and maybe sooner. Issuers will be in control of this transition and the issuers will have benefits that seemed Jetsons-esque a few years ago: the ability to know their holders; to reward them with rewards, discounts & enhanced voting rights and dividends; and to end naked short-selling. And then there is what is genuinely new. Lower cost structures unlock retail lending products that were previously institutional-only. Equities as tokens become building blocks: bundle them, recombine them, create investment products that simply couldn't exist before. 24/7, settlement, and transparency are table stakes. The more interesting story is what's next. Clarity Act doesn’t have much to do with any of this tbh. On my call with management this morning I lamented that we didnt get Clarity Act yesterday in particular because I thought tradfi big banks would invest more in crypto if they felt the security of federal legislation. But then I asked the team if not getting the bill hurts our existing business in a material way. The answer was no. In fact, some of the stuff in the bill scared me a bit like the prohibitions on stablecoin operators paying rewards. So, like, goodbye Clarity Act, we hardly knew you. With the world we are in in 2026 and not 2024, CLARITY still matters. Durable legislation would give the digital asset industry greater certainty. But even with legislation, the real work of implementation happens at the agencies, and agencies can move faster. For tokenized securities, the @SECGov innovation exemption and @CFTC rule changes may prove more consequential in the near term. They are where the role of the issuer, the issuer-sponsored token and the transfer agent will start to take shape. @Bullish will do its part. We will tokenize 3,000 issuers with the real thing: issuer tokens where the token is the stock itself and not any of this complicated stuff everyone else is writing white papers and drawing diagrams about. Here is our white paper “token = stock.” This is what the issuers and the investors want. I’ll tell you publicly what people are saying privately: issuer sponsored tokens are the best answer, not this soup of synthetic derivative products. Back to working to build the best institutional-grade systems for issuers in the world