Aug. 19, 2026, 4:04 a.m. ET
Right now, a New Jersey resident who loses money on a digital asset platform has no reliable answer to the simplest question a consumer can ask: Who do I call?
I use cryptocurrency the way a lot of people use a checking account, to save and to send money to family. For New Jersey residents helping support parents in Colombia, the Dominican Republic or the Philippines, the difference between a bank wire and a digital transfer isn't abstract. It shows up as fewer days waiting and less money lost to fees. I've also watched what digital assets can do for people who have spent their lives on the wrong side of a bad credit decision, people a bank branch never took seriously, who finally have a way to save and move money on their own terms.
That is why the Senate’s current delay in passing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is indefensible.
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Crypto users and digital asset developers have gone years without a clear legal and regulatory framework in place. They’re operating under rules written for a different century that are enforced inconsistently. This status quo means the large majority of honest actors pay the highest price for ambiguity because they’re the ones who bother attempting to comply.
The Clarity Act, as the name suggests, would remove this uncertainty and finally create clear rules of the road for digital assets in America – modernizing the laws that govern our financial system. It would require the platforms holding your money to register with a federal regulator. It would require customer funds to be kept separate from company funds. It would set real custody standards and require issuers to disclose what a token is and who controls it, and how customer funds would be treated if the platform failed.
These baseline protections will allow more Americans to confidently access the benefits that crypto has unlocked for me.
But unless we act soon, we risk falling behind. Other countries have already put comprehensive regulatory frameworks in place. The United States built the internet, and yet we are asking entrepreneurs to interpret an inconsistent set of enforcement actions instead of the law. When we hesitate, we do not stay neutral. We hold ourselves back at exactly the moment when we should be setting the example.
Congress must pass the Digital Clarity Act
The Clarity Act isn't stuck because lawmakers can't agree it's needed. The U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of the bill in July 2025, 294-134, a margin most bills this Congress can only dream of. Now, with a cloture vote scheduled for September, the Senate is closer than ever to sending it to final passage.
The people who come through the education sessions in Hoboken that I help run are not day traders chasing a quick return. They're first-generation savers who never trusted a bank branch and small business owners tired of a three-day payment window and a fee attached to it. They immediately see the benefits of this technology; now they need their government to put laws in place that give them the confidence to fully adopt it.
Senators Booker and Kim have this vote in front of them when the Senate returns, and New Jersey has real money riding on how it goes. The fundamental question is whether Congress will write the rules or leave families to find out the hard way what happens when nobody does.
What drew me to this technology is that, done correctly, blockchain delivers the two things citizens ask of their institutions and rarely get at the same time: transparency and trust. It’s time for Congress to deliver on this promise and for the Senate to pass the Clarity Act.
Carlos Iván Merino is the Stand with Crypto New Jersey Chapter president, and founder and executive director of the New Jersey Innovation and Technology Alliance.
