On Tuesday, the Senate failed to secure the 60 votes required to pass a procedural motion advancing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Coming on the heels of a 294-134 House victory and years of bipartisan collaboration, watching this landmark piece of legislation stall on a procedural vote is deeply frustrating to many of us in the industry.
As a founder who has spent years championing this framework, it is natural to view Tuesday’s result as a significant setback. But even amid this disappointment, there is a silver lining for the digital asset ecosystem: we already won.
The debate over the Clarity Act is not the first time a battle has been fought over a conflict that has already been resolved. On January 8, 1815, American troops routed the British at the Battle of New Orleans, the last major confrontation of the War of 1812. More than 2,000 British soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured, compared to only a few dozen Americans. Unbeknownst to the combatants, negotiators had signed a peace treaty in Europe two weeks earlier. The news was still crossing the Atlantic.
Those soldiers fought a battle over a dispute that had already been settled elsewhere.
The congressional debate over digital assets has a similar quality. It was not decided by attacking the financial establishment, but by hundreds of millions of ordinary people in the United States, Mexico, Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil, Turkey and across the globe. They compared what the traditional system offered with a better alternative and voted with their own money.
A construction worker in Texas sending wages home can pay an intermediary a steep fee and wait days, or send a stablecoin that arrives in seconds for a fraction of a cent. A shopkeeper in Turkey watching her currency depreciate can hold digital dollars on her phone. A young software engineer in Vietnam can remain shut out of dollar markets by geographic restrictions, or open a digital wallet and connect to the global economy. None of them is making an ideological statement. They were making an arithmetic one.
That is why the institutional stampede of the past eighteen months was inevitable. JPMorgan’s deposit token runs on a public blockchain. Citi moves tokenized dollars around the clock. In June, the four largest U.S. banks confirmed a shared tokenized deposit network, a defense against stablecoins that inherently acknowledges the strength of the competition. Visa and Mastercard settle transactions in stablecoins. Morgan Stanley opened crypto trading to E*Trade customers.
Capital runs both ways. Intercontinental Exchange took a stake in OKX. In July, Citadel Securities invested $400 million in my company at a $20 billion valuation, our first institutional fundraising round in ten years. One of the world’s most sophisticated market makers concluded that the infrastructure worth owning is being built on these rails.
This is not a collection of pilot programs. It is the plumbing of American finance being rebuilt by firms with zero ideological attachment to crypto.
They came because the comparison is not even close. Stablecoin transfers totaled roughly $33 trillion last year, up 72%. A blockchain dollar moves in seconds, at negligible cost, at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. The same dollar moving through correspondent banks crosses several intermediaries, takes days, and stops for weekends.
But the deeper reason is fairness. The traditional system reserves its best terms, including the fastest settlement, tightest spreads, and exclusive deals, for those who already have wealth. It hides costs in exchange-rate markups and spreads, and its books become public only four times a year, after the fact. In 2008, the world learned what sat on many institution’s balance sheets at roughly the same time their executives did.
A public blockchain inverts those defaults. The ledger is open and identical for everyone. Reserves can be verified in real time. The fee is visible before a user presses send. The protocol doesn’t know whether a wallet belongs to a hedge fund manager or a domestic worker, settling both in the same block. That is a feature of the architecture, and one incumbents cannot easily copy without surrendering the asymmetry that enriches them.
None of this excuses crypto’s growing pains. Real people lost real money to fraud and excessive leverage. But many of the industry’s most damaging failures occurred at centralized companies operating with the old system’s opacity, where customer funds were commingled on spreadsheets no outsider could audit. Companies like mine should be held to bank-grade standards for custody, capital, and disclosure.
What changed in Washington is not simply a partisan victory. The president deserves credit for reversing the government’s prior hostility. So do the Democrats who crossed party lines on the GENIUS Act, the House vote on the CLARITY Act, and the Senate Banking Committee’s market-structure legislation.
The remaining disputes are important: they include ethics rules for public officials who profit from digital assets, illicit-finance safeguards, stablecoin yield, and protections for software developers. Clear ethics rules fit naturally within a market premised on publicly verifiable ledgers. But these are now arguments among legislators who overwhelmingly accept the technology’s role in the financial system and merely disagree on the fine print. That consensus did not disappear with Tuesday’s vote.
Nor are the agencies powerless without new legislation. In March, the SEC and CFTC issued joint guidance classifying digital assets into five distinct categories. Regulators are also implementing the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin provisions. Between them, these commissions can establish meaningful standards for disclosure, custody, and customer assets segregation while keeping this critical activity onshore.
Still, a federal statute is far preferable. Agency guidance can be reversed by future administrations, whereas legislation ensures. Since the Senate failed to find 60 votes this time, the next Congress must finish the job. But no one should mistake a procedural failure for a final verdict on digital assets.
The Battle of New Orleans did not determine how the War of 1812 ended, but it shaped American politics for a generation anyway. Tuesday’s vote is similar. It was not about whether digital assets belong in the U.S. financial system; ordinary people made that choice years ago, and the banking sector followed. It was about whether the United States writes the rules for a system its citizens increasingly rely on, or abdicates that role to foreign jurisdictions that resolved these questions while Washington debated procedure.
America has been the world’s financial capital for more than a century. It will preserve that leadership by embracing the next generation of financial architecture. Not defending the old one.
Mr. Marszalek is a founder and chief executive of Crypto.com, OG.com, and Ai.com
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.