The cryptocurrency industry spent years citing U.S. regulatory clarity as the prerequisite for its next phase of growth. This past week showed the industry may have had the sequence backward.
On Sept. 15, the Senate failed to invoke cloture on the legislation intended to establish a broader market framework for digital assets, with the 49-50 vote falling short of the 60 votes required to proceed. But the blockchain financial infrastructure being built around an anticipated U.S. crypto ecosystem did not stop with the lawmakers’ vote.
S&P Global acquired blockchain security company OpenZeppelin in order to expand its risk assessment business to on-chain financial products on Sept. 17. A day earlier, Circle introduced Arc, a blockchain designed for financial markets, real-time money movement and agentic economic activity. Also on Sept. 16 — just one day after the failed Senate vote on the Digital Asset Market Structure Clarity Act — cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase moved ahead with a product designed to put crypto inside community banks, and on Friday (Sept. 18) reportedly requested regulatory approval to list perpetual futures tied to individual large-cap U.S. stocks.
Elsewhere, business payments firm Bottomline on Sept. 17 formed a partnership with blockchain company Chainlink, with Global Pay Connect enabling banks to connect “seamlessly to multiple blockchain networks through a single, network-agnostic integration model” through connectivity with Bottomline.
Also on Sept. 17, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced it was “taking a significant step forward, within its statutory authority, to bring America’s capital markets into the digital age by facilitating onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks through the ‘Innovation Exemption.’” That same day, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) separately submitted to the Office of Management and Budget a proposal to regulate crypto asset transactions and crypto asset markets, according to a pending regulatory review notice.
These announcements, many of them months if not years in the works, underscore how the industry question is now shifting from when Washington will give crypto permission to scale to how much of crypto can scale without waiting for Congress.
Read more: Clarity Stall Leaves Banks and Exchanges Looking to SEC
Even Without Regulation, Crypto Products Keep Launching
Crypto is being absorbed into regulated finance without waiting for Washington to finish regulating “crypto” as a unified category. Stablecoins are becoming payments infrastructure. Banks are experimenting with blockchain settlement. Visa is connecting traditional payment data to on-chain lending. And the SEC is creating regulatory sandboxes around products Congress has yet to comprehensively address.
The next phase of institutional crypto may therefore arrive not because Washington finally writes one rulebook, but because companies learn how to commercialize one narrow use case at a time without it.
“[The] vote doesn’t change what we see every day. Global businesses and financial institutions are already settling on stablecoin rails because it’s faster and works outside banking hours, and none of that depended on the Senate,” Eric Queathem, founder and CEO of Velocity, told PYMNTS in an interview.
“What clear rules do is make the next decision easier: they shorten the path from a first use case to running real volume, and they bring in the companies still waiting on the sidelines. That’s the opportunity in front of Congress. Businesses have already shown the demand is there, but written rules give more clarity and confidence to the US market,” he said.
See also: What Stablecoins Can Learn From the $12 Trillion Repo Market
Still, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that within financial services, credit union members’ awareness of stablecoins remains limited, with many consumers placing both these digital assets and other cryptocurrency in the same mental bucket.
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“The Wallet Effect: How Credit Unions Can Close the Digital Currency Access Gap,” a June 2026 Credit Union Tracker from PYMNTS Intelligence and Velera, found rising interest in digital currency among younger consumers, and a limited grasp on how various digital assets work.
“For credit unions, that gap creates a chance to educate members and introduce services through trusted channels rather than rushing into complex offerings,” PYMNTS wrote.
The research found that 31% of millennials express strong interest in using cryptocurrency for payments, with 28% saying the same about stablecoins. Meanwhile, 94% of baby boomers and seniors had little to no interest in stablecoin payments, versus 92% for cryptocurrency as a whole.
Read more: Crypto Experts Tell PYMNTS Where Digital Assets Go Next
Crypto Is Being Unbundled Before It Is Regulated
There is another consequence. Washington has spent years trying to determine how to regulate cryptocurrency. The market is today breaking “crypto” apart before lawmakers finish answering the question.
Stablecoins can be treated as money movement infrastructure. Tokenized stocks remain securities. Bank-issued digital money can sit inside prudential regulation. Custody can be offered as infrastructure. Blockchain lending can be connected to conventional payment flows.
That fragmentation creates regulatory pathways that did not exist when the central policy debate was whether Bitcoin, Ether or thousands of other tokens were securities or commodities.
That shifts the concept of regulatory risk across digital assets. The old risk was prohibition: Will regulators allow this product to exist? The emerging risk is fragmentation: Which regulator governs which part of a transaction, under which rules, and for how long? And will that regulatory umbrella shift with the executive branch?
Crypto’s regulatory breakthrough, in other words, may not be clarity. It may be learning to operate without it.
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