Crypto Got Its Rulebook Without Congress, Chris Perkins Says

A week after the Senate blocked the crypto market-structure bill, the Franklin Crypto executive argued on Bits + Bips that the SEC and CFTC have already handed institutions the certainty the industry was waiting for.

Chris Perkins says crypto now has its rulebook, Congress or not

Original Photo by Chris Grafton on Unsplash

Posted September 22, 2026 at 6:07 am EST.

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.”

What the SEC and CFTC did

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.