FTX's Regulated Arm Survived. That's the CLARITY Act Case

When FTX collapsed in 2022, the losses ran through almost every entity under its name. Not all of them broke. LedgerX, a CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, came through whole. Its customers' assets stayed segregated and intact. The reason was not a corporate firewall or a clever mechanism. It was law.

LedgerX operated under federal rules that required segregation of customer funds and gave regulators the authority to check. Those rules held even as the unregulated side of FTX ran on promises that turned out to be empty. The contrast is the core argument for the CLARITY Act, a bill that would impose federal oversight on digital asset markets–and one the Senate has not yet passed.

Randi Abernethy, Head of Clearing and Group Risk at Bullish Exchange, testified on the bill before a House Financial Services subcommittee in July 2026. She argued that a federal framework would prevent the next failure from spreading into traditional markets. The parallel she drew is not that tokenized assets are a repeat of subprime mortgages. It is that a shock travels through shared plumbing whether or not your desk touched the instrument that broke.

Stablecoins alone hold over $100 billion in Treasury bills. If a large stablecoin breaks and has to sell, the shock lands in funding markets that every desk relies on. Federal Reserve staff have flagged the risk. It nearly happened in March 2023, when Circle's USDC briefly lost its dollar peg because its reserves sat in a failing bank. The IMF has warned that such a shock would travel faster than in 2008, because digital asset markets lack clearinghouse requirements that contain a default before it spreads.

The CLARITY Act would write federal rules for the industry: customer asset segregation, conflict-of-interest limits, capital adequacy, transparency. It would assign supervision to existing federal agencies. Its backers include Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Franklin Templeton–firms that see clearer rules as a way to expand their own onchain operations. Critics say the rules are too lenient. The Senate left the question unanswered this week, with a thin window in September before an election year.

Without federal law, the current protections are scattered. The SEC has published an interpretive notice sorting 16 tokens. The Fed runs a collateral pilot. A few no-action letters and a memorandum of understanding between two agencies cover the rest. Any of it can be revoked without a vote. States provide uneven coverage–real protection in some, little in others, none at all in several–for a market that is national in scope.

LedgerX showed which model works. Its CFTC supervision meant segregation was not optional; it was checked. The unregulated part of FTX ran on promises. Under one roof, law held and promises broke.

The CLARITY Act would make the regulated, onshore model the norm. Firms are already returning to the U.S.: Nexo came back after years abroad, London's Wintermute opened a New York office, Switzerland's Taurus set up in New York to serve its bank clients. The bill would lock that migration into law rather than leaving the next firm to choose the dark.

Abernethy's point in her testimony was direct: every system at scale meets its test of rigor. Only those built on law survive it. The next crisis is a question of when, not whether. The bill's odds, as tracked by market monitors, fell to 27% after the Senate delay.