Crypto Got Its Rulebook Without Congress, Chris Perkins Says

The CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate on Sept. 15, when a motion to take it up drew 49 votes to 50, 11 short of the 60 it needed and a major setback for the industry’s effort to write the rules for digital assets into federal law. Chris Perkins, head of Franklin Crypto, told listeners the failure changes less than the headlines suggest.

“I think we’re fine either way. We have clarity,” Perkins said on the Sept. 21 episode of the Unchained podcast Bits + Bips, which he co-hosts with Austin Campbell and Ram Ahluwalia. That clarity, he said on the show, is “very powerful for institutions,” even “in the absence of the law.”

His case rests on what the two agencies that oversee crypto have done on their own. Two days after the vote, the SEC issued a five-year innovation exemption that lets venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks on public blockchains without registering as national securities exchanges (CoinDesk). The CFTC, down to a single commissioner in Chairman Michael Selig, has said it will write its own crypto rules if Congress does not.

To Perkins, that resolves a question the industry had long fought over. The problem, he said on the podcast, had been “taxonomy”: “We didn’t know what was a security and we didn’t know it was a commodity.” Now, he added, “we’ve got great rules for both.” Where before “if a token had a cash flow, it was a security and it was left for dead,” he said, the agencies have removed that barrier. “The regulators are providing that clarity,” he said.

Perkins called it a “regime change,” one he argued is bigger than most investors realize. He said crypto is starting to trade on fundamentals rather than as a “frontier risk asset” pushed around by macro and geopolitical stress. He pointed to bitcoin, which has climbed even as the Fed raised interest rates on Sept. 16 for the first time since 2023. “There’s a lot of reasons for a frontier risk asset not to be performing right now,” he said on the show. Bitcoin closed above its 50-week moving average on the weekly chart for the first time in roughly 45 weeks, and was trading above $87,000 during Monday’s episode.

He said he was untroubled that regulators, not Congress, delivered the framework, pointing to the courts’ retreat from Chevron deference to agencies. In the post-Chevron world, he said, “these regulators, they’re smart.” Of Selig, Perkins said, “I know Chairman Selig,” and described him as someone who “was a very strong attorney.” A statute would still have been better, he allowed on the podcast: “Enshrinement would’ve been great. Federal preemption would’ve been great.” But, he said, “We march on.”

What the agencies have issued is not permanent. The SEC’s exemption runs five years and arrived with a request for public comment, and the CFTC’s recent crypto guidance states on its face that it is not binding on the commission. The bill itself may not be dead either: seven Senate Democrats reopened negotiations on the market-structure legislation within days of the vote. Whether regulatory clarity that can be revised or expire is worth as much to an institution as a law is the question Perkins’s optimism leaves open, and one his co-hosts pressed, with Campbell noting that both of the CFTC’s instruments describe themselves as temporary.

Related Listen: Crypto’s Clarity Act Collapses. Two Days Later, the SEC Introduces Its Innovation Exemption

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/unchainedcrypto.com\/crypto-got-its-rulebook-without-congress-chris-perkins-says\/#arve-youtube-u-hi8ocnxgk","@type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/u-HI8ocnXgk?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=1&autoplay=0"}

The post Crypto Got Its Rulebook Without Congress, Chris Perkins Says appeared first on Unchained.