Bitwise Says GENIUS Act Unlocked Crypto Funding, Sees CLARITY Act as Next Catalyst

Bitwise said fundraising in the cryptocurrency industry has accelerated since passage of the GENIUS Act, the U.S. stablecoin bill, and that the next catalyst could be the CLARITY Act, a digital-asset market structure bill.

Matt Hougan, Bitwise’s chief investment officer, wrote in an investor memo on May 12 that it was no coincidence that three Web3 projects — Circle’s Arc, Canton and Stripe’s Tempo — raised more than $1 billion combined over the past several months.

He said the projects are focused on stablecoins, tokenized securities, or STOs, and infrastructure for asset tokenization. All three pursued large fundraising rounds after the GENIUS Act passed in July 2025.

Hougan outlined three shifts. The first was privacy, a core feature of Arc, Canton and Tempo. That is a different direction from the transparency emphasized by Ethereum and Solana. He argued that if corporate transaction records and other fund flows are exposed on public blockchains, transparency can become a burden rather than a benefit.

The second was regulation. The GENIUS Act, he wrote, reduced the regulatory uncertainty that had kept institutional capital from entering the sector. When the legal foundation was unclear, institutions struggled to commit capital to related businesses. After the bill passed, large fundraising rounds gathered pace.

Hougan identified the CLARITY Act as the next key variable. He stopped short of a detailed assessment because the bill’s final language has not been set, but wrote that it is worth watching.

Competition was another major shift he cited. Canton’s investors include Goldman Sachs, Citadel, DTCC, S&P Global and Nasdaq. Tempo has reportedly received input during its design process from Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, Visa and OpenAI. Earlier public blockchains emerged from developer communities and technical experimentation, but newer entrants are drawing support from traditional finance, or TradFi, and Big Tech.