When the Senate turned down President Trump’s preferred crypto legislation, the CLARITY Act to “provide regulatory guardrails” for crypto, some might have thought it was a setback for the cryptocurrency industry. Just the opposite: In stepped the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) immediately, headed under Trump by Paul Atkins, a Wall Street lawyer who just happens to have been chair of the Token Alliance, an advocacy group for the Chamber of Digital Commerce. Atkins also acknowledged at his confirmation hearings that he owned millions in cryptocurrency assets, which he promised to divest, but according to Wikipedia, still does not appear to have done so. Wikipedia also quoted from ProPublica: “During [Adkins’] time at the SEC since April 2025—ed.) the SEC has dropped or settled numerous lawsuits with cryptocurrency companies and adopted a lax regulatory approach to cryptocurrency.”

The SEC, then, went right to work and, two days after the CLARITY Act defeat, green-lighted “tokenized securities,” which are digital tokens which “imitate” stocks actually being traded on the exchanges, and in addition to going up and down in price along with the real stocks, also pay out dividends and allow proxy votes, speedy settlements, and a’ that.Who pays these dividends out? Why, trusted “third parties” like BlackRock, Inc., for example, and the well-known stock gambling firm Robinhood. Many exchange-listed companies have objected to tokenization, even sued the “third parties” doing it, as interfering with corporate capital-raising, and generally, buying and selling what they don’t own at all. Shades of the pre-2008 securitization of millions of mortgages by “servicer banks” which had never legally owned any of the mortgages.

But, the Wall Street Journal argued on Sept. 18, the SEC action “rules out synthetic stock tokens” (that is, financial derivatives contracts) which are being sold in some European countries.