The Post-Clarity Act Regulatory Fragmentation

With the CLARITY Act effectively dead for the current congressional session, the defining question for digital asset governance research is no longer “what will Congress do?” It is: what happens to market structure, legal certainty, and innovation when agencies fill governance gaps without coordinating legislative frameworks? 

This is a core question in IRAIET’s Digital Assets and Blockchain Systems research agenda — and the October 2026 regulatory environment provides a live empirical case.

The CFTC published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on crypto asset transactions. The SEC proposed modernized custody rules for digital assets. Florida’s stablecoin law took effect. UK and EU regulators addressed tokenization simultaneously. 

The research questions this multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional activation generates:

How do overlapping agency frameworks create regulatory arbitrage opportunities — and what governance mechanisms limit them? What is the relationship between regulatory fragmentation and IP structure in digital asset businesses — does fragmentation create incentives for more or less robust IP protection? How do international regulatory coordination efforts, like the UK-EU tokenization coordination of October 8, interact with the fragmented US framework?

These questions require sustained, independent research across legal, economic, and governance disciplines — exactly the interdisciplinary work IRAIET is built to produce.