WASHINGTON UPDATE IT’S TIME TO TALK TOKENIZATION ROB NICHOLS President and CEO American Bankers Association For much of 2026, the conversation around digital assets has been dominated by stablecoins, as regulators worked to implement the Genius Act — the 2025 law governing stablecoins — and lawmakers debated the Clarity Act, a more comprehensive regulatory framework for all digital assets. To be clear, ABA supports establishing clear rules of the road for digital assets, but the version of the Clarity Act under consideration when the Senate recessed in August needs to be strengthened. With help from bankers, our state association partners and other business groups, we’re engaged in an all-out push to protect local lending and the economic growth it fuels by ensuring crypto companies aren’t allowed to incentivize deposit flight from banks by offering yield-like rewards on payment stablecoins. While we continue our work to improve the Clarity Act and make sure crypto firms looking to compete with banks face the same rigorous rules as banks, it’s also time to move the opportunities that digital assets present for our sector to the center of the conversation, including opportunities around tokenized money. Simply put, “tokenization” is the process of representing ownership of an asset on a blockchain, and “tokenized money” refers to programmable digital tokens — like stablecoins, tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies — that represent ownership of money on a blockchain. The first thing to understand about tokenization is that it’s happening right now. Capital markets are already shifting bonds, funds and collateral onto shared ledgers, so it follows that tokenized securities will need tokenized money to work efficiently. Whether in capital markets or treasury management and 8
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