The U.S. financial regulatory structure is a national asset. In the last decade, there has been a growing universe of financial activity thanks to digital assets and blockchains. That universe is about to expand again as artificial intelligence-driven financial products and services come online and need rails to run on. We need a bigger U.S. regulatory tent with clear rules of the road, inviting more capital and innovation to America under our supervision and standards.
The smaller the tent, the more that activity moves offshore, on someone else’s terms. Seen this way, the question in front of Congress on digital assets was never whether to regulate. It’s whether America’s tent expands to capture this technology, or watches Russia and China build it first.
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One year ago, our nation ran an experiment. On July 18, 2025, Congress passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act to broaden the regulatory tent to include stablecoins. The flight of innovation that skeptics predicted never came. The opposite did: stablecoins came onshore, and foreign issuers moved assets under U.S. supervision. At Anchorage Digital, we became the first federally regulated stablecoin issuer in the country and led this onshoring. This was proof that you could hold builders to a U.S. bank-grade standard and still let them build. Under the new law, the market didn’t shrink. It grew.
But GENIUS covered a single asset class. The tent has expanded, but it is still too narrow, and much of the digital asset industry still sits outside it, in the same gray zone that pushed American companies offshore in the first place. Protocols still can’t say with certainty whether their assets are securities or commodities. Major platforms still operate with little or no federal supervision. Consumer protections are thin, and anti-money laundering coverage is uneven. Other jurisdictions are already writing the rules we’ve left unwritten. The window to set the global standard is open now. It will not stay open on its own. As AI agents begin transacting and settling payments at machine speed, that window narrows further. Whoever owns the rails that commerce runs on will set the terms for everything built on top of it. Capital is patient, but it is not loyal.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act makes the U.S. regulatory tent bigger, extending it to the rest of the market. It sorts digital assets into clear categories and assigns each to a regulator equipped to oversee it. It brings digital asset exchanges and broker-dealers inside the tent. They will be registered, reporting, and uniformly subject to the Bank Secrecy Act for the first time. And it writes real custody and consumer protections into law. In plain terms, it takes the parts of this industry that operate today with almost no supervision and puts them under American rules.
This is why CLARITY has the potential to unite people who agree on almost nothing else. Settlement on public blockchains is faster and carries less counterparty risk than the rails we depend on today, the same rails AI-driven commerce will run on next. And every transaction that clears in dollars, under U.S. oversight, extends the dollar’s reach deeper into the digital economy.
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A bigger U.S. regulatory tent helps deliver all of these benefits at once. Stablecoins, cryptocurrency, blockchains, tokenization, and agentic payments will define how money moves next, and America can’t afford to watch that future get built elsewhere. Alexander Hamilton warned that real strength comes from what a nation builds, not what it imports. Digital infrastructure is becoming one of those essentials, and CLARITY is how America builds it at home.
The lesson of the past year is simple: When America expands its tent to include new technologies, the world builds within it. GENIUS proved it for stablecoins. CLARITY can prove it for everything else. It’s time for Congress to keep American financial leadership right where it belongs, not in the hands of our adversaries.
Nathan McCauley is the co-founder and CEO of leading global digital asset platform Anchorage Digital, America’s first federally chartered stablecoin issuer and home to Anchorage Digital Bank N.A.
