Family offices are invisible. But they've shaped the technology you use every day. Li Ka-shing's family office (Horizons Ventures) was an early investor in Facebook, Spotify, Zoom, Skype, Siri, and DeepMind — before any of them were household names. His $36M in Zoom became an $11B stake. The Pritzker family office (Tao Capital) was an early backer of Tesla, Uber, and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos invested $250K in Google in 1998 through what became Bezos Expeditions. That stake is now worth over $3B. Suhail Rizvi's family office quietly acquired 15.6% of Twitter before its IPO — a stake worth $3.8B on day one. He also held pre-IPO positions in Facebook, Square, and Snapchat. Most people have never heard his name. The Newhouse family office owns Reddit. Kapor Capital — built on the Lotus 1-2-3 fortune — was in Uber's angel round. These aren't venture capital firms. They're family offices. Patient capital. No fund lifecycle. No LP pressure. Multi-generational time horizons. One-third of all capital invested in startups worldwide now comes from family offices (PwC, 2022). And yet most people — including many in finance — don't know what a family office is or what they do. F0256. March 30th. West Palm Beach.

Reg Crypto and the Innovation Exemption have been and are still open for public comment. You SHOULD read them. You can see them here: 1) Reg Crypto: sec.gov/rules-regulations/pu… 2) Innovation Exemption: sec.gov/rules-regulations/pu… Also, provide your comments! Regulators want and should hear from industry.

The work continues from CFTC/SEC! CFTC updated its crypto FAQ yesterday. It appear Tokenized Treasuries and tokenized MMF shares are now eligible investments for FCM customer funds. Tokenized MMF shares also work as uncleared swap margin. Stablecoins still can't be an investment of customer funds — margin and residual interest only.

ETFs didn’t start with a rule. They started with exemptions - sound familiar? From 1992 on, the SEC issued 300+ exemptive orders so ETFs could even exist. By 2019: ~2,000 funds, $3.3T — all before Rule 6c-11. Last week’s Innovation Exemption is the same tool. Let the market run under conditions. Write the durable rule after you have evidence.

No longer just buying a jersey, buying a ticket to a game or two and buying trading cards. What @socios @Securitize understand is the hundreds of millions of fans searching for a deeper connection to their team/s. Very excited to see this roll out.

I got to do a post mortem on CLARITY. Hint: there isn’t a single source that caused the initial vote failure. Second key note: crypto getting clarity from the regulators has past precedent; they did for stock index futures in 1981, swaps in 1989, and ETFs starting in 1992.

This is one of my favorite parts of what @HesterPeirce writes: "the insights gained will inform the development of durable, comprehensive rules to govern this emerging market activity". This is an objective, empirical way of creating sensible regulation vs the former subjective, precedent based format.

For too long, regulatory uncertainty has prevented responsible, yet critical innovation from taking root in the United States. It has been a priority of my chairmanship to reverse this trend. Though temporary, the Innovation Exemption is a principled, structured grant of relief designed to resolve genuine legal uncertainty, while providing investor protections and upholding market integrity standards. Through this order and a number of ongoing initiatives, we will ensure that America remains the world’s premier destination to build the next generation of financial infrastructure.

IE (Innovation Exemption) is out: sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-st…

I wrote this on July 13th - beat ya by 2 months @jpmorgan 😉 ar.ca/blog/claritys-home-str…

Politics beat policy today. There are serious, resolute Americans on both sides of the aisle. I have been in rooms where a Democrat thanks a Republican, and the other way around. Then the phones come out. The clip gets cut. The feed gets fed. That is when bipartisanship dies. Echo chambers get their fuel. Years of work get flattened into a scoreboard. And we lose the chance to build the jobs and businesses of tomorrow, today. I am not only disappointed in the CLARITY vote. I am disappointed that we keep choosing the performance over the product. There were members — some of them freshmen — I thought could help lead us out of this. Today I am less sure. I will still work with them, and with the staff who stay late, write the drafts, and never get the clip. I know some of you. I look forward to knowing more. Your work was not wasted. We go back to work. We learn from what failed. Thank you for serving the country.

When peers say crypto means “better ways to buy groceries and gas,” they leave it there. How, exactly? Cheaper settlement. Every tap of a card or Apple Pay costs the station ~8¢ a gallon. On a $50 fill-up, roughly a dollar goes to the card networks. You’ve seen the signs at the gas station: cash $4.20, credit $4.30. Stablecoins (USDC, etc.) settle in seconds for a fraction of a cent. No classic interchange. Far less chargeback risk. If the effective take-rate drops from ~2% toward zero, that’s several cents a gallon that can come out of the price — or become a bigger pay-this-way discount. This does not make crude cheaper. It attacks the 2–3% tax on a thin-margin gallon. Connect that dot and CLARITY stops sounding like an industry bill and starts sounding like a constituent talking point.

Members in tight races don’t vote on “market structure.” They vote on whether the people in their state keep more money, hire more neighbors, and feel like DC is working for them. Crypto keeps talking to itself. CLARITY dies if we keep doing that. Put yourself in that member’s chair. Groceries. Mortgage. A kid’s school. A plant that might add a shift — or freeze hiring until “someone in Washington decides what this asset even is.” Stablecoins and tokenization are real. They still don’t show up on a kitchen table in Missouri or Wisconsin unless we draw the line. Last year I walked @RepBryanSteil through one Wisconsin line item: Harley-Davidson brings front forks and rear shocks from Showa in Japan into York and Menomonee Falls. A USD/JPY wire still hits correspondent banks, cutoff times, T+1 to T+5. A dollar stablecoin can settle in minutes, 24/7. When a shipment sits for payment confirmation, that is payroll and production in Wisconsin — not a white paper. Same conversation with @SenatorHick staff: 30+ companies already operating in Colorado that will not hire until the path is clear. Chokepoint 2.0 didn’t “regulate.” It pushed American founders and taxable payroll offshore. That’s lost GDP in the states those members represent. National security and the “space race” framing are true. They are not what a parent in Waukesha or Aurora hears first. Celebrate the work that already hits the ground. In 2025 @Ripple / @bgarlinghouse put $25M into DonorsChoose ($15M) and Teach For America ($10M) — most of it in RLUSD. A year later: 48,108 classroom projects in all 50 states, 86% in majority low-income schools; stipends for 2,300 new TFA teachers; financial-literacy materials for hundreds of thousands of students. That’s the template. Not another DC talking point. CLARITY should pass. The job now is not another thread about why we need it. It’s one page per state: which employers, which payments, which classrooms, which hires. If the industry can’t make that case in plain English, members in contested races will keep choosing the issue that already has a grocery-store sentence.

This cycles memecoins paired with tokenized equity is v1 of something that could actually matter. Tokenized equities + DeFi lend/borrow is how you give the ~50-70% of Gen Z living paycheck to paycheck a potentially useful tool.

DeFi Summer 2020 was special. The velocity of innovation felt like a freight train at full speed, pointed squarely at building a new digital economy. Chokepoint 2.0, the Wells notices, and years of regulatory drag have smothered that energy. I’m hopeful CLARITY or Project Crypto can restore it—not just deliver more ETFs, but reopen the path for real innovation.

Important step, not the finish line. Senate Leader Thune just filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the Clarity Act (H.R. 3633). That means the bill now has a formal path to the floor when the Senate returns in September. It’s the procedural green light. It is not “done.” It is not “passage locked. Some accounts are pumping that narrative right now. They’re wrong. My sentiment may come across as negative - hardly the case. This legislation could undo the years of pain from Chokepoint and set a course allowing real innovation in digital assets to occur. But there’s still work: What has to happen: 1. Cloture vote on the motion to proceed (needs 60) 2. Vote to actually take up the bill 3. Debate + amendments 4. Cloture on the bill itself (again 60) 5. Final passage 6. Potential House-Senate reconciliation Real progress. Still real work left. The path is open — now the votes and remaining policy issues have to line up.

I’ve seen posts trying to pin the current state of CLARITY on Democrats. I’m not a member of the party, but I won’t let that stand. Title I of the 616-page merged CLARITY text is formally titled the “Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act of 2026.” @SenGillibrand did serious, sustained work across the aisle on this. The ancillary asset framework — network tokens, disqualifying financial rights, and Reg Crypto under Sec. 10103 — traces back to her earlier RFIA drafts. @Sen_Alsobrooks also played a decisive role. She helped write the provision that unstuck the bill: Sec. 404, the stablecoin yield compromise she finalized with @SenThomTillis. It bans interest-like yield, preserves activity-based rewards, and requires a joint Fed/OCC/FDIC/NCUA/Treasury report on deposit impacts. Sec. 604, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act — was introduced by Lummis with exactly one co-sponsor: @RonWyden. When law enforcement groups were balking on developer protections, Wyden wrote Thune and Schumer to keep it in. There has been good, hard policy work done on both sides of the aisle. Credit where it’s due. One last note; let’s not forget the dark days of Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Those events should never happen in a country that prides itself on the pursuit of the American Dream. Our entrepreneurs deserve a framework that they can use to build our future.

I’ve said this multiple times, and I mean it every time: thank you to the staffers who have poured thousands of hours into CLARITY this year. The hundreds of meetings, the careful reconciliation of specific words, and everything else you’ve carried — done with professionalism, patriotism, and grace — has not gone unnoticed.