The crypto industry has moved decisively into the center of global and financial policy discourse at Davos. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting took place this week, with senior crypto executives, including Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Jeremy Allaire, appearing alongside TradFi heavyweights such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink. While crypto figures have spoken at Davos in prior years, this year’s discussions and tone reflected a clear evolution in how blockchain technology is understood by institutions and regulators. One shift at Davos this year was how crypto felt part of the discussion and not just a footnote to other topics and debates.
The official agenda slated sessions like “Is Tokenization the Future?” and “Where Are We on Stablecoins?” which explicitly focused on where digital assets fit within existing financial infrastructure and not just on whether they should be allowed to exist. Panels framed tokenization as gaining real operational traction, including commentary on reducing costs and settlement friction, and stablecoins emerging as a scaled use case, moving the conversation toward how blockchains are integrated into payments and settlement systems. These discussions align with broader World Economic Forum narratives that blockchain and digital assets are transitioning from experimentation to enterprise-grade deployment, aided by clearer regulatory frameworks and growing institutional pilots. The industry has essentially elbowed its way into institutional circles, where these subjects are now treated as foundational building blocks of internet finance, and not just niche curiosity and debate as it has been in the past.
Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee posted draft language for the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act (“DCIA”), which should eventually be combined with completed product from the Senate Banking Committee to form the totality of the crypto market structure bill. Because the Senate Agriculture Committee oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the draft language focuses on the digital commodity markets, particularly giving the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction to regulate and oversee spot crypto markets. The Committee plans to hold a markup hearing on Tuesday, Jan. 27, during which point members from both parties will likely offer amendments. Although the commodities side of the crypto market structure debate, including CFTC jurisdiction over spot market oversight, is generally viewed as less controversial than the securities side, this discussion draft is a partisan document.
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