Crypto.com founder: Crypto’s battles will continue, but the war is over

The Senate failed to reach the 60 votes needed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, despite its prior 294-134 House passage, delaying a durable U.S. crypto market-structure framework. The commentary argues that institutional adoption continues regardless: stablecoin transfers totaled roughly $33 trillion last year, up 72%, while major banks, Visa, Mastercard and brokerages are expanding tokenized-money and crypto initiatives. SEC and CFTC guidance and GENIUS Act implementation may provide interim standards, but the author argues that federal legislation remains necessary to secure regulatory certainty and retain U.S. financial leadership.

Analysis

The failed procedural vote matters less for near-term transaction volumes than for the cost of capital applied to U.S.-linked digital-asset infrastructure. Without durable statutory market-structure rules, regulated banks can continue limited tokenization programs but will be reluctant to commit balance sheet to open-network settlement, preserving a bifurcated model in which private deposit-token rails compete with stablecoins. That is incrementally favorable to JPM and C as they can monetize closed-loop corporate cash-management products while limiting disintermediation of low-cost deposits; it is less constructive for crypto-native exchanges and custodians whose valuation depends on U.S. regulatory certainty.

V and MA retain the best optionality: they earn on payment orchestration regardless of whether settlement ultimately occurs through card rails, bank deposits, or stablecoins. The nearer-term risk is that scalable stablecoin merchant acceptance attacks cross-border and debit economics, but this is a multi-year margin issue rather than a 1-3 month earnings event; incumbent networks can initially capture value through on/off-ramp, credentialing, FX, and compliance services. ICE's strategic value is more asymmetric but less directly monetizable in reported results, making any immediate equity re-rating difficult to justify.

The contrarian read is that the market may over-credit institutional pilots as evidence of imminent revenue displacement. Banks' incentives favor permissioned systems with KYC controls, reversibility and deposit retention, while the unresolved issues around yield, AML liability and customer-asset treatment are precisely the issues that determine whether public-chain economics scale in regulated finance. Over the next 1-3 months, agency implementation, Senate calendar visibility, and any guidance on stablecoin yield are more actionable catalysts than broad adoption rhetoric; a restrictive interpretation would favor bank-issued deposit tokens over payment stablecoins.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Maintain a modest 6-18 month overweight in V and MA versus diversified banks: payment networks offer settlement-rail optionality without taking direct stablecoin reserve, compliance, or deposit-flight risk. Reassess if cross-border transaction growth decelerates materially while stablecoin merchant settlement demonstrably scales; absent that evidence, this is not an immediate disruption short.
• Pair trade for the next 3-6 months: long JPM / short COIN, sized small. JPM benefits if regulatory ambiguity channels institutional activity into bank-controlled tokenized deposits, while COIN's multiple remains unusually sensitive to a durable statutory framework. Falsify on a credible bipartisan Senate path to final passage or material COIN institutional-volume/share gains independent of crypto prices.
• Do not buy ICE solely on its ecosystem exposure. Set an alert for disclosed exchange, custody, clearing, or stablecoin-linked revenue and for evidence that ICE's investment creates proprietary distribution or infrastructure economics; without disclosure, the impact is too small relative to ICE's core data and exchange businesses.
• Watch stablecoin-yield implementation and bank deposit-beta data over the next two quarters. If rules permit broadly distributed yield-bearing stablecoins while large-bank noninterest-bearing deposits weaken, rotate from JPM/C toward V/MA and crypto infrastructure proxies; if yield is constrained, favor JPM/C as deposit-token adoption becomes the more likely institutional path.