Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says Wall Street’s crypto adoption now depends on fixing old trading rules and fragmented market infrastructure.
itwise CIO Matt Hougan doesn't think Washington's crypto-friendly turn is the moment that completely unlocks Wall Street.
In an interview with CryptoSlate, he described the real barrier as something far less dramatic than a single landmark bill. The “brutal real answer” is that it comes down to a million small steps, and some of them are deeply unsexy.
The SEC unveiled its Regulation Crypto Assets proposal on Aug. 18, describing a fit-for-purpose framework for certain crypto investment contracts with exemptions reaching up to $75 million over 12 months.
A day later, President Donald Trump used a White House crypto event to push the CLARITY Act. He said CFTC Chair Mike Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. in a fully compliant, legal way.
Hougan called this stretch a good week, pointing to the SEC proposal, the Hyperliquid comments, and a Financial Accounting Standards Board proposal. That FASB project could clarify whether certain stablecoins qualify as cash equivalents.
Trump's Hyperliquid comments fit into a bigger structural point Hougan makes about U.S. finance itself.
He said that the “U.S. financial market infrastructure is like a bunch of parallel chains for individual asset classes,” describing separate rails for stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives that are difficult to move between by design.
In Hougan's view, tokenization and Hyperliquid-style infrastructure could eventually collapse those rails into financial super apps where multiple asset classes trade side by side.
The concept that could change market structure is cross-margining. Sharing collateral across stocks, bonds, derivatives, and crypto lets capital work more efficiently across a portfolio, instead of holding a separate pool for each product line.
SEC Chair Paul Atkins has independently voiced support for super apps that let a single license cover custody and trading across asset classes. The SEC-CFTC harmonization initiative also includes portfolio margining and cross-margining among its joint priorities.
Hougan's example of that pattern is stablecoins. The GENIUS Act became law in July 2025, but its core provisions still depend on implementing rules that federal regulators have not finished writing.
Hougan pointed to the FASB proposal covering how certain digital assets could qualify as cash equivalents as another small step in the same direction, the kind of update that shapes balance sheets more than headlines.
The FASB project remains under development, so he argued that institutions do not wait for every rule to be finished. They move once the regulatory direction looks durable enough to justify building, acquiring, and integrating, and that threshold keeps getting crossed one unsexy rule at a time.
The bull case has Rule 611's rescission, SEC-CFTC harmonization, and tokenized-stock standards advancing together over the next year, letting DeFi venues, brokerages, and stablecoin settlement rails begin interoperating in genuine practice.
In that scenario, tokenization keeps expanding in headline numbers while failing to deliver the unified liquidity Hougan says the market needs.
Hougan makes clear that the plumbing question, the one that decides whether Wall Street can use any of it, gets answered rule by unsexy rule.
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