Ex-Fed CIO Tuteja: Bitcoin (BTC) Rulemaking Presses On Daily as CLARITY Act Stalls

Daily Rules From SEC and CFTC

Sunayna Tuteja, the former chief innovation officer of the Federal Reserve, expects US digital asset regulation to keep advancing even if the CLARITY Act never reaches a final vote. In an interview held in Seoul's Gwangjin district on Thursday, October 1, 2026, she said the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency that oversees futures markets, have already begun preparatory work for the scenario in which the market-structure bill does not pass, and that the effort will continue.

Her assessment follows the Senate's failure to invoke cloture on the bill, the procedural step that would have opened the CLARITY Act to full chamber debate. Since that vote, the SEC and the CFTC have published new guidelines and rules nearly every day, a cadence Tuteja read as a very positive signal because the regulators are not waiting on Congress. Administrative guidance does reduce uncertainty in the near term. She framed the agencies' posture as preparation for a market that keeps functioning with or without the bill.

She was direct about the structural limit of that path: rulemaking without new legislation cannot deliver the long-term durability and stability that a statute provides. For that reason she still counts herself among those who expect the bill to pass, with the lame-duck session before the end of 2026 as the window she is watching. The GENIUS Act, the federal framework that settled stablecoin regulation, already demonstrated what passage can do, and Tuteja described it as an enormous tailwind for innovation. The Fed participated where its role required, alongside Treasury and the White House, and the statute is now in its rulemaking stage, with completion hoped for by January.

The remarks land while Bitcoin (BTC) price action stays tightly coupled to the regulatory calendar, and her core conclusion is that digital asset innovation will neither slow nor stop regardless of how the legislative track ends.

Stablecoins or Tokenized Deposits

Asked what replaces a US central bank digital currency, Tuteja's answer was that nothing public will. The Federal Reserve has stated repeatedly that it will not pursue a CBDC without congressional approval, and Congress has shown no interest, she said, which leaves dollar tokenization to the private sector.

Two solutions now compete. Stablecoins grew out of the digital asset ecosystem and have built real momentum. Their earliest use, she recalled from her own trading days, was as an on-ramp and off-ramp for traders moving in and out of markets around the clock, when the kimchi premium was part of the opportunity set. Tokenized deposits are the banks' answer: deposits and customers sit inside traditional finance, so incumbents designed their own instrument to defend that position.

She separated the two with a three-R framework. Reserve: US dollar stablecoins are backed by Treasury securities, while tokenized deposits are backed by commercial bank money. Redemption: how much confidence users have in converting either instrument back one-to-one, without a depeg, under market stress. Resolution: whether a formal mechanism exists to make users whole after an accident or a loss. Picking a winner, she argued, is not the job of regulators or central banks; the user, whom she called the final decider, will choose whichever instrument solves the problem faster, cheaper and more safely.

Tuteja pointed to BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase as the forces now tokenizing global assets across money, equities, bonds and derivatives. The next frontier is agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents execute payments and contracts directly, choosing counterparties, order types and settlement rails without human intervention. With machine-to-machine payment volumes set to grow tenfold or a hundredfold, she named the dollar stablecoin as the core rail, settled continuously on a public mainnet rather than through legacy banking hours. Korea's Digital Asset Basic Act, which she described as combining the scope of the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, could position the country early in that shift.

Lame-Duck Window Is the Test

COINOTAG's reading: the two threads in this interview trace a single arc, a US regulatory order splitting into a legislative track that has stalled and an agency track running ahead of it. The distinction sits in the documents themselves. The GENIUS Act is signed law that already binds stablecoin issuers, and its rulemaking should wrap up by January 2027 on Tuteja's timeline. The CLARITY Act, by contrast, remains a proposal: as filed, it would divide oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, but nothing in it binds any entity until Congress enacts it. Daily agency guidance fills the gap in the meantime, though it cannot give the market the durability of a statute.