Tokenization and stablecoins may dodge the Democrats' Washington shake-up

Democrats swept the midterms and took control of Congress, and crypto's grand Washington plan just got a lot harder to sell. The Clarity Act, the sweeping market-structure bill that was supposed to settle the turf war between regulators, has failed to advance, according to CoinDesk. But two corners of the industry — tokenized Wall Street assets and stablecoin payments — look far less rattled than the rest.

Tokenized stocks, bonds and funds can keep rolling under laws that already exist, industry experts told CoinDesk. Peter Curley, head of global regulatory affairs at tokenization firm Ondo Finance, said he expects the SEC and CFTC to get grilled by lawmakers more often, but sees no reason for tokenized securities to stall. Agencies have already done substantial work without new legislation, he argued, and that work should continue in areas like tokenized securities and derivatives where the rulebooks are already written.

Aaron Kaplan, founder and co-CEO of regulated digital asset firm Prometheum, is singing from the same sheet. Broker-dealers are poking at crypto offerings inside brokerage accounts, issuers are building tokenization strategies, and overseas trading venues are eyeing the DTCC's tokenization service as a back door to listing tokenized U.S. equities abroad, he said. His take: the industry shouldn't sit around waiting for Congress, because the securities laws already on the books are enough.

Stablecoins have their own armor. The GENIUS Act, which cleared Congress with bipartisan support in 2025, built a federal framework for payment stablecoins that forces issuers to hold liquid reserves and submit to federal or state oversight. Abhishek Vaidyanathan, chief legal officer at the NEAR Foundation, pointed out that the law passed with Democratic votes and kicks in on January 18 — fifteen days after the new Congress is seated, so issuers have a statute to lean on. Everything else, he said, keeps running on existing law, interpretations and proposed rules.

Then comes the durability problem. Regulators spent much of 2026 writing rules to fill the hole Congress left, and now Democrats' win raises doubts about how much of that gets finished before Trump leaves office. The SEC has floated pulling blockchain into transfer-agent rules, an exemption for venues trading tokenized securities and a Regulation Crypto Assets that would loosen requirements on crypto offerings. The CFTC has been pushing ahead on perpetual futures.

Lawyers are split on how fast the brakes come on. Elizabeth Lan Davis of Davis Wright Tremaine, a former CFTC chief trial attorney, expects rulemaking and the finalization of proposed rules to slow dramatically, especially if Democratic commissioners arrive. Kris Swiatek, a partner at Seward & Kissel, anticipates less disruption but more scrutiny of agency authority — and he and Davis both say the real question is how long any of these rules survive a change in administration. Guidance can be yanked by the next White House; formal regulations take far longer to unwind, so the fallout won't land immediately, Davis said. DeFi could be the nastiest fight of all: Democratic proposals want broader oversight of the people who design, control or profit from the apps that connect users to decentralized protocols, raising hard questions about how much protection software developers get.