5 minBusiness
Founder Says Crypto's War Is Over Despite Senate Setback
The Senate failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, but founder Kris Marszalek argues the industry has already won as stablecoins and tokenized dollars reshape global finance.
The Senate failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a procedural defeat that stalled landmark legislation despite its earlier passage in the House by a 294-134 margin. For many in the digital asset industry, the result was a sharp disappointment after years of bipartisan work. But founder Kris Marszalek argues the setback does not change the larger reality: the war over crypto's place in finance is already over.
Marszalek compared the Senate vote to the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, when American and British troops fought a bloody engagement two weeks after negotiators in Europe had signed a peace treaty. The combatants did not know the dispute was already settled. In the same way, he wrote, lawmakers are debating a question that ordinary people around the world have already answered with their own money.
That answer, according to Marszalek, is not ideological but arithmetic. A construction worker in Texas sending wages home can pay steep fees and wait days through traditional intermediaries, or send a stablecoin that arrives in seconds for a fraction of a cent. A shopkeeper in Turkey watching her currency depreciate can hold digital dollars on her phone. A software engineer in Vietnam can open a digital wallet and connect to the global economy rather than remain shut out of dollar markets by geographic restrictions.
The institutional response has been swift. JPMorgan's deposit token runs on a public blockchain. Citi moves tokenized dollars around the clock. In June, the four largest U.S. banks confirmed a shared tokenized deposit network, a move Marszalek described as a defense against stablecoins that inherently acknowledges the strength of the competition. Visa and Mastercard settle transactions in stablecoins. Morgan Stanley opened crypto trading to E*Trade customers. Intercontinental Exchange took a stake in OKX.
Capital is flowing both ways. In July, Citadel Securities invested $400 million in at a $20 billion valuation, the company's first institutional fundraising round in ten years. Marszalek said the investment showed that one of the world's most sophisticated market makers concluded the infrastructure worth owning is being built on these rails.
Stablecoin transfers totaled roughly $33 trillion last year, up 72%, according to Marszalek. A blockchain dollar moves in seconds at negligible cost at any hour, while the same dollar through correspondent banks crosses several intermediaries, takes days, and stops for weekends. He argued the deeper reason for the shift is fairness: the traditional system reserves its best terms for those who already have wealth, hides costs in exchange-rate markups, and publishes its books only four times a year. A public blockchain, by contrast, offers an open ledger identical for everyone, with reserves verifiable in real time and fees visible before a user presses send.
Marszalek acknowledged crypto's growing pains, noting that real people lost real money to fraud and excessive leverage. Many of the industry's most damaging failures occurred at centralized companies operating with the old system's opacity, where customer funds were commingled on spreadsheets no outsider could audit. He said companies like his should be held to bank-grade standards for custody, capital, and disclosure.
He credited the president for reversing the government's prior hostility and Democrats who crossed party lines on the GENIUS Act, the House vote on the CLARITY Act, and the Senate Banking Committee's market-structure legislation. Remaining disputes include ethics rules for public officials who profit from digital assets, illicit-finance safeguards, stablecoin yield, and protections for software developers.
Those are now arguments among legislators who overwhelmingly accept the technology's role in the financial system and disagree only on the fine print, Marszalek wrote. He noted that agencies are not powerless without new legislation. In March, the SEC and CFTC issued joint guidance classifying digital assets into five distinct categories, and regulators are implementing the GENIUS Act's stablecoin provisions. Between them, he argued, the commissions can establish meaningful standards for disclosure, custody, and customer asset segregation while Congress continues to debate.
