Crypto for Advisors: Wall Street is done waiting on Congress for crypto rules

That question ran through a Crain’s New York Business event last week, whether the topic was tokenization, compliance or cybersecurity. The people closest to the work aren’t waiting for Congress. They’re building for the world as it is.

Adam Schumann, vice president of legal at OKX, laid out the legal problem. U.S. firms answer to federal statutes, federal agencies, state laws and state regulators, and none of them move at the same speed. “You want general consistency, but you’re not going to reach uniformity,” he said. Firms work out the rest state by state and country by country, while agencies patch the most immediate gaps.

That patchwork has a cost. Aravind Raju, CFO of Uphold, said compliance is now one of the company’s largest departments because it builds tailored solutions for each state’s requirements. As rules become clearer and more aligned, he expects those resources can be redirected. For advisors, the takeaway is that compliance is a real cost of doing business on these platforms, and the firms that manage it well will have an edge.

You might expect that duplication to push the industry toward shared infrastructure. Instead, many institutions launched private, closed networks this year for tokenized assets, stablecoins and securities ledgers, and those networks can’t easily talk to one another. Lewis Tuff, CEO of Twilight, which builds clearing and settlement technology, said the result is that every firm ends up rebuilding the same connections.