A part of FTX survived, and it’s the case for the CLARITY Act

OpinionA part of FTX survived, and it’s the case for the CLARITY ActWhen FTX collapsed, the parts of it bound by law survived. Mainstream finance is now converging with digital assets, and the law built to protect it the same way is the one the Senate did not pass this week, argues Bullish's Randi Abernethy.By Randi Abernethy, Tram Doman|Edited by Cheyenne LigonUpdated Aug 7, 2026, 2:37 p.m. Published Aug 7, 2026, 2:30 p.m. 4 min readMake preferred on ShareShare this articleCopy linkX iconX (Twitter)LinkedInFacebookEmailMake preferred on In the weeks the Senate spent not passing the CLARITY Act, the largest institutions in American finance kept moving onchain. JPMorgan tokenized ETF holdings through the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporations (DTCC) production pilot, and more than 50 firms, among them BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, have signed on to tokenize stocks and Treasuries through the same infrastructure. BlackRock's CEO calls tokenization a way to "update the plumbing of the financial system.” The matter before Congress has stopped being about crypto.If you run a traditional desk and treat CLARITY as a problem for the digital asset industry rather than your own, consider 2008. A new instrument grew up fast, inside the regulated system, on rules that had never been stress-tested, and when it broke the loss did not stay where it started. It reached firms that never touched a subprime mortgage and erased some $17 trillion in household wealth.Randi Abernethy is the Head of Clearing and Group Risk at Bullish Exchange. She testified on the CLARITY Act before a House Financial Services subcommittee in July 2026. Read her full congressional testimony here.The parallel is not that tokenized assets are the next subprime; it is that a shock travels through shared plumbing whether or not you touched what broke. The wiring is no different now: stablecoins alone hold well over $100 billion dollars in Treasury bills, and if a large stablecoin breaks and is forced to sell…

A part of FTX survived, and it’s the case for the CLARITY Act

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