You’re reading Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter that unpacks digital assets for financial advisors. Subscribe here to get it every Thursday.

In today’s newsletter, Eric Soufer of Tusk Strategies looks at what financial firms are building while Congress stalls on a crypto framework.

Then, in “Ask an Expert,” Diego Grassano explains what advisors should check before trusting a tokenized platform.

Without a federal framework, financial firms are standardizing compliance and infrastructure on their own.

When the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act on Sept. 15, the U.S. was once again left without a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets, and regulators moved to fill part of the gap. Two days later, the SEC issued an “innovation exemption” allowing certain venues to trade tokenized U.S.-listed stocks onchain.

But an exemption is not a statute, and it can be narrowed or withdrawn as easily as it was granted. That leaves financial firms with a practical question: What do you build while you wait? For advisors, the answer matters more than who won or lost in Washington.

That question ran through a Crain’s New York Business event last week, whether the topic was tokenization, compliance or cybersecurity. The people closest to the work aren’t waiting for Congress. They’re building for the world as it is.

Adam Schumann, vice president of legal at OKX, laid out the legal problem. S. firms answer to federal statutes, federal agencies, state laws and state regulators, and none of them move at the same speed.

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