There’s a changing of the guard taking place across crypto.
The Sept. 15 failure of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act to advance in the Senate has coincided with a rash of leadership changes across the cryptocurrency establishment. The Blockchain Association is changing chief executives. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce, who was the designated leader of the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, is now departing the agency on Oct. 2. Circle, one of the industry’s largest stablecoin issuers, is replacing its CFO while a co-founder has announced his departure from its board. Earlier in the summer, Coinbase’s own chief legal officer stepped down.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, SEC, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are proceeding with digital-asset initiatives under their existing authorities.
Crypto spent years trying to get Washington to write its rules. Now, with its signature market-structure legislation stalled, the industry is discovering that the rulebook is being written anyway, just not entirely where it expected.
Read more: 5 Crypto Launches That Bet on Clarity but Are Still Going
Washington and the Industry Are Rewriting Crypto’s Go-Forward Playbook
The Clarity Act’s failure to move forward in D.C. left unresolved questions about regulatory jurisdiction and the durability of rules developed without new congressional authorization. The legislation remains procedurally capable of reconsideration, but its immediate legislative path has stalled.
The crypto sector’s regulatory path, however, has begun to lay out a new path. On Sept. 24, the Federal Reserve proposed two sets of rules implementing the already-enacted GENIUS Act. They address permissible stablecoin reserve assets, capital requirements, risk management, custody arrangements and the approval process for supervised banks seeking to issue payment stablecoins, all issues that Clarity was meant to answer.
“The Wallet Effect: How Credit Unions Can Close the Digital Currency Access Gap,” a June 2026 Credit Union Tracker from PYMNTS Intelligence and Velera, found rising interest in digital currency among younger consumers, and a limited grasp on how various digital assets work.
As PYMNTS covered here, the proposals also bring stablecoins into the familiar bank strategy discussion of the choice of charter and regulator. A national bank issuing through a subsidiary would work principally with the OCC. An FDIC-supervised state bank would follow the FDIC’s process, while a Federal Reserve-supervised state member bank would use the Fed’s.
These measures do not replace comprehensive legislation. They do, however, establish practical regulatory pathways while the larger jurisdictional debate remains unresolved.
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See also: What Stablecoins Can Learn From the $12 Trillion Repo Market
Crypto’s Washington Leadership Is Changing
The disputes surrounding the Clarity Act exposed competing concerns over market oversight, financial safeguards and the appropriate boundaries of cryptocurrency regulation. A renewed legislative effort would need to address those disagreements rather than simply revive the previous campaign.
Perhaps the most consequential development is that the competitive boundaries themselves are shifting.
On Sept. 22, SoFi announced that it would use its SoFiUSD stablecoin to settle card transactions on Mastercard’s network, with the initiative expected to support more than $25 billion in annual transaction volume. The development illustrates how banks and payment networks are beginning to incorporate stablecoins into existing financial services rather than treat them exclusively as cryptocurrency products.
Read more: SEC Rulemaking Is Giving Corporate Finance a New Crypto Hurdle Rate
For the cryptocurrency industry, the developments suggest that regulatory clarity is no longer a single legislative destination. It is emerging through multiple, sometimes overlapping processes: congressional negotiations, agency rulemaking, bank supervision, international regulation and commercial adoption.
The leadership transitions across Washington and the private sector arrive at precisely this juncture.
The next phase will test whether an industry organized around securing recognition for digital assets can adapt to the more complicated business of operating them inside the financial system.
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