5 Crypto Launches That Kept Moving After the Senate’s Clarity Act Stalled

The U.S. Senate failed on Sept. 15 to invoke cloture on the Digital Asset Market Structure Clarity Act, but the market did not wait for Congress to finish the script. In the same week, S&P Global, Circle, Coinbase, Bottomline, the SEC, and the CFTC all advanced products or frameworks tied to on-chain finance, which is the part high-risk PSPs should care about: the infrastructure is being built before the rulebook is complete.

1. On Sept. 17, S&P Global acquired blockchain security company OpenZeppelin to expand its risk assessment business into on-chain financial products. For PSPs and banks, that is a useful signal: traditional risk and data players are moving from watching blockchain to underwriting it.
2. A day earlier, Circle introduced Arc, a blockchain built for financial markets, real-time money movement, and agentic economic activity. Circle is not pitching blockchain as an abstract settlement layer here; it is framing it as payments and market infrastructure.
3. On Sept. 16, just one day after the Senate vote failed 49-50, Coinbase moved ahead with a product designed to put crypto inside community banks. Then on Friday, Sept. 18, it reportedly requested regulatory approval to list perpetual futures tied to individual large-cap U.S. stocks. The sequence matters: Coinbase is pushing both distribution through banks and market products that still need regulatory sign-off.
4. Also on Sept. 17, business payments firm Bottomline formed a partnership with blockchain company Chainlink. Through Global Pay Connect, banks will be able to connect “seamlessly to multiple blockchain networks through a single, network-agnostic integration model” via Bottomline’s connectivity. For a bank, the appeal is obvious: one integration point instead of stitching together a pile of separate blockchain links.
5. On the same day, the SEC said it was “taking a significant step forward, within its statutory authority, to bring America’s capital markets into the digital age by facilitating onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks through the ‘Innovation Exemption.’” Separately, the CFTC submitted to the Office of Management and Budget a proposal to regulate crypto asset transactions and crypto asset markets, according to a pending regulatory review notice. In other words, the regulators are not waiting for Congress to finish the job before setting up their own lanes.

The bigger point is not that Washington stopped mattering. It is that crypto is being absorbed into regulated finance one use case at a time: stablecoins as payments infrastructure, banks testing blockchain settlement, payment data moving on-chain, and regulators carving out narrow pathways while a full market framework remains stalled.