Blockchain was supposed to put Wall Street’s middlemen out of business. Instead, the middlemen are racing to build it.

BlackRock (NYSE:BLK), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) have rolled out tokenization projects over the past year, and brokerages Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ:HOOD) and Kraken already sell tokenized US stocks to overseas customers, according to Bloomberg.

The appeal is real. Tokenized assets trade around the clock and can be lent out or posted as collateral, freeing up capital that sits idle today.

The catch is Washington.

Tokenizing US stocks requires the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, which the White House wants passed by July 4, now under three weeks away. But the bill is stuck in the Senate over President Donald Trump‘s crypto ties, and prediction markets give it barely better than a coin flip.

For investors, the real question is how legacy stocks hold up. When the GENIUS Act set federal rules for stablecoins last year, Visa (NYSE:V) and Mastercard (NYSE:MA) each fell 5% to 6% in a single session as traders weighed the threat to their payment networks.

Why The Buildout Hinges On Washington

The CLARITY Act would define when a token counts as a security, the missing piece that lets a token legally stand in for a share. The House passed it in July 2025, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced its version in a 15-9 vote in May. It now sits on the Senate calendar.

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt set the July 4 target at the Consensus conference last month, though he conceded there was “not a lot of slack left in the rope.”

Polymarket currently prices 2026 passage at 53%.

On the same Consensus stage, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) gave a blunter read, predicting the bill would not reach the president’s desk until August.

The Holdup Is Trump, But Not Only Trump

According to David Nage, portfolio manager at Arca, the bill’s substance is 80% to 85% finished, and what remains is a fight over rules barring officials from profiting from crypto businesses they oversee, language made charged by scrutiny of Trump’s family crypto ventures. Nage’s base case still sees a floor vote in mid-to-late July, already past the White House’s own deadline.

The opposition runs deeper than optics, though. Massachusetts securities regulator William Galvin has called the bill a “recipe of disaster,” warning it would deregulate penny stocks and gut state investor protections.

The Tradeable Angle

Robinhood already issues tokenized stocks abroad and runs a fast-growing prediction markets business, leaving it exposed both to the tokenization buildout and to the contracts traders are using to price the bill itself.

Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) sits in a similar spot.

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