Wall Street may finally get a clearer crypto rulebook it has spent years waiting for when Washington passes a market structure bill on Tuesday. But even if it doesn’t, financial institutions are unlikely to stop building in the digital assets business.

The Senate’s expected vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY) could give banks, brokers and asset managers more certainty about how they can trade and build products around digital assets. While passage could accelerate that work and bring more traditional firms into the market, failure may be less of a roadblock than it once would have been.

“It would be hugely helpful and beneficial to Wall Street adoption of the technology, but it is by no means a necessary predicate,” said Chris Crawford, a digital-assets partner at law firm Fenwick.

Traditional financial firms have already pushed into crypto through exchange-traded funds, tokenization platforms and other digital-asset products despite years of uncertainty over how securities and commodities laws apply. CLARITY could make those decisions easier, but it would not be starting Wall Street’s adoption from zero.

Crawford said the bill could give firms clearer boundaries on which digital assets are commodities and how they can be traded. Defining that perimeter could also give firms more certainty about what constitutes digital security when brokers and trading platforms handle these assets.

“You would kind of have much easier processes internally, at any shop that touches crypto in whatever form it is, to understand what is the regulatory framework that applies to us,” Crawford said.

Wall Street isn't waiting

So what happens if the Clarity Act doesn’t get the vote it needs on Tuesday?

Brian Vieten, senior research analyst at Siebert Financial, said passage could effectively give U.S. financial firms a “green light” to accelerate blockchain investment, launch tokenized products and pursue acquisitions to gain a foothold in digital assets.

But failure could create a more counterintuitive incentive: move faster.

“We think U.S. firms already have an economic incentive to accelerate product launches and tokenization activity into 2027-28 while today’s more favorable regulatory environment remains in place,” Vieten said. “In that scenario, failure to pass CLARITY could actually pull some activity forward rather than eliminate it.”

“Either way, we think Wall Street’s buildout of digital asset infrastructure continues,” he added.

The idea is that firms already see commercial opportunities in tokenization and digital assets. If Congress fails to lock the new regulatory direction into law, some companies may prefer to launch products while the near-term environment remains relatively favorable rather than wait for a future administration or regulator to change course.

For example, the SEC and CFTC are already moving ahead with writing rules for the digital assets sector that are meant to help institutions, even if lawmakers can’t deliver on the Clarity Act.

Robinhood, which has expanded aggressively into crypto and tokenized securities, said it supports the legislation and is pushing for bipartisan backing.

“Robinhood has long advocated for clear regulatory guidelines for digital assets, ensuring innovation can flourish while appropriate consumer protections remain intact,” said Michael Ahern, vice president of U.S. government affairs at Robinhood Markets. “The Clarity Act is a positive step forward, and we’ll continue to encourage bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate.”

The bill’s path to passing, however, remains politically difficult.

For tomorrow’s voting, the bill will need a large number of Democrats to vote yes if it's going to beat the Senate's 60-vote threshold. The ethics provision, barring the U.S. President and other senior government officials from conducting business in the digital assets sector, was also one of the major outstanding issues preventing the bill’s passage. However, Trump has agreed to most of the ethics provisions in the new text released on Sunday.

Then there are other issues. A big one is how regulatory authority over crypto is divided and how digital commodities can be traded. The bill has also faced disputes over stablecoin rewards, with banking groups pressing lawmakers for tighter restrictions over concerns that interest-like payments could pull deposits from banks. Eight banking trade groups reiterated those concerns in a letter to Senate leaders on Monday.

Institutions have already crossed the line

For professional investors, meanwhile, the vote may have even less immediate impact.

“It matters, but not that much to the individual professional investor or these large platforms that have model portfolios where they’ve already added bitcoin,” said Ryan Rasmussen, research analyst at Bitwise.

Investors have frequently asked Bitwise about CLARITY over the past three months, Rasmussen said, but uncertainty over the bill has not become the main factor preventing them from allocating to crypto.

“They’re not going to remove it from their portfolios because CLARITY doesn’t pass,” he said.

That reflects a broader shift in institutional crypto adoption.

Spot bitcoin ETFs opened another route into the asset for professional investors in 2024, while large financial firms have continued expanding their digital-asset businesses.

Crawford said failure could temporarily preserve an advantage for crypto-native companies accustomed to operating in regulatory gray areas. But he doesn't expect that advantage to last.

Eventually, he said, Wall Street “catches up.”