The payment rails connecting traditional finance to on-chain assets are already operational. Arthur Firstov argues that builders are waiting for one thing: a statute that tells them what they can carry.
In the end, the House Financial Services Committee’s hearing on tokenization ended without a framework. Still, it produced something arguably more durable. Congress put on the record, with bipartisan agreement, that the regulatory architecture governing tokenized securities does not yet exist and can’t wait. For an industry that spent years arguing its case to largely indifferent lawmakers, that concession matters more than it might appear.
Markets don’t wait for congressional validation. The on-chain real-world asset market is already carrying $29.18 billion in distributed value, according to RWA.xyz. Nasdaq, NYSE and DTCC are building. BlackRock, JPMorgan and Franklin Templeton have already deployed institutional-grade tokenized products. Congress was not examining a theoretical future. It was catching up to a market already in motion.
Summer Mersinger, CEO of the Blockchain Association, made the structural argument in her
written testimony: tokenized securities are still securities, but the infrastructure beneath them no longer has to look like the siloed, batch-based systems markets have relied on for decades.
The Hard Questions Nobody Could Answer
One structural barrier deserves more attention than it received. Among the witnesses, Salman Banaei of Kimber Labs delivered the most technically detailed testimony of the session, and buried within it was a finding that received almost no coverage: TEFRA, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, is an unintended obstacle sitting directly in the path of tokenized bond issuance.
Written to prevent bearer bonds from facilitating money laundering, TEFRA now inadvertently prohibits tokenized bond issuance on permissionless public blockchains where transfers occur between self-custodied wallets. The reason is structural: peer-to-peer token transfers are functionally indistinguishable from bearer bonds under its current language. The consequences are not theoretical.
The penalties are severe: denial of interest deductions, excise taxes at issuance, and a 30% withholding tax on interest regardless of investor residence. Set that against the scale of what is at stake: the global bond market represents over
$100 trillion in outstanding debt, and America’s competitors are already racing to capture tokenized fixed income issuance. Congress now has the map. The question is whether it moves before the window closes.
The Layer the Hearing Ignored
Getting a family office in Munich, a pension allocator in São Paulo, or a retail investor in Seoul in and out of a tokenized product, converting local currency into an on-chain position and back again, compliantly, in near real time, across jurisdictions with different rules, is not a solved problem. That is the layer the session largely ignored, and it determines whether tokenized capital markets serve a narrow institutional audience or actually scale.
The infrastructure bridging fiat and on-chain assets is already being built. Partnerships between payment providers and card networks such as Visa and Mastercard are compressing multi-day conversion processes into near-instant transactions. Know Your Customer (KYC) processes are being embedded into the conversion flow itself. The plumbing is ahead of the statute. Every firm processing conversions, routing cross-border flows, and embedding crypto access inside existing financial products is building on regulatory ground that remains without solid foundations. The companies making that bet now are betting the direction is clear even if the final rules are not. That bet is reasonable. But it requires the CLARITY Act to follow through.
The Competitive Clock
The CLARITY Act passed the House with a 294-134 vote. The Senate Agriculture Committee has advanced its portion. What remains is a narrow window before midterm dynamics compress the Senate calendar past the point of no return. Senator Bernie Moreno has said publicly that failure to reach the floor by May effectively kills the bill for the year. That is the scheduling math, not a dramatic assessment.
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January 2026 EY-Parthenon and Coinbase survey found 66 per cent of institutional investors cite regulatory uncertainty as the primary reason that they are not deploying into digital assets. That capital is making decisions about where to go next.
Less than a tenth of 1 per cent of the world’s assets are currently tokenized. Furthermore, Boston Consulting Group estimates that the figure for RWA tokenization could reach $16 trillion by 2030, equivalent to about 10 per cent of global GDP. What is in doubt is whether the US writes the rules governing that growth and reaps the benefits. The companies building compliance infrastructure today, on both the asset side and the access side, are the ones that will actually be ready when frameworks across global jurisdictions emerge.
The window is open. It will not stay that way. Every week of delay is a week capital spends making decisions elsewhere. This is a trend that the US may not be able to reverse if decisive action isn’t taken.
