CLARITY Act News: Bitwise CIO Says Bitcoin Isn’t the Biggest Winner Here

President Trump is reportedly set to meet with top crypto executives at the White House this week, arriving at a moment when the CLARITY Act remains stuck in the Senate and its odds of passing this year keep shrinking.

Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management, said no formal agenda has been released, but the attendee list offers strong clues. With names from both crypto exchanges and traditional exchanges like CME, ICE, and the DTCC expected in the room, Hougan believes tokenization will dominate the conversation. 

“We’re going from 9:30 to 4 to 24/7,” he said, describing the shift from calendar futures to perpetual futures as part of a broader mega-trend reshaping how everything gets traded.

Why Bitcoin Gets a Boost, But Isn’t the Real Story

Hougan sees the meeting as broadly positive for Bitcoin, since the largest crypto asset tends to benefit whenever the administration signals continued commitment to the space. But he pointed to a different group as the bigger potential winners: DeFi applications like Uniswap, Hyperliquid, and oracle networks like Chainlink.

The Market Size Argument

His reasoning centers on how these platforms are currently priced. Today, he said, they’re valued as if they only serve crypto’s roughly $2 trillion market. If tokenization expands as expected, those same platforms could start serving the equity market, worth around $150 trillion, or the bond market, closer to $200 trillion.

“Investors are going to have to upsize their total addressable market,” Hougan said, pointing to products like the Bitwise Hyperliquid ETF and a potential Bitwise Solana ETF, given how much tokenized stock activity already runs on Solana.

Will CLARITY Pass Before the Midterms?

On timing, Hougan said the crypto industry clearly wants CLARITY passed before the midterms, preferring a foundation built on law rather than shifting SEC rulemaking. Still, he wasn’t optimistic about a clear path forward, noting Polymarket currently prices the odds of passage at around 20%.

If the bill does pass, he said, crypto enters an entirely new market environment. If it doesn’t, he expects the SEC and CFTC to keep pushing policy forward on their own in the meantime.