The crypto industry has been desperate for U.S. regulation as the last major piece in its global maturity puzzle, but sector veteran and compliance expert TuongVy Le, a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer, argues that what Congress and the regulators are working on isn’t just for today’s digital assets space but for the core of the future financial system.

Le, who has held top legal and regulator positions at Anchorage Digital, Bain Capital and the former Worldcoin (now World Network), told CoinDesk that she expects the new rules coming to her old regulatory employer will eventually govern the business at the heart of the markets. Migrating the securities and commodities transactions in traditional finance onto the blockchain is a dramatic move for a field that’s been stuck in a legacy approach to handling transactions, rooted in lengthy clearing and settlement approaches established decades ago.

«The crypto-tradfi convergence has already started,» she said in an interview, outlining ideas further amplified in a paper she published with New York University’s Austin Campbell on Monday. «Once market structure and stablecoin legislation is passed, it’s really going to take off. Honestly, it can be hard to realize you’re undergoing a real transformation as it’s happening, but I think we’ll look back on this the way we looked at the internet and how it fundamentally changed how we communicate and interact as a society.»I really do believe that blockchain technology and tokenization are going to remake the financial system,» said Le, who is set to appear this week at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

She’s so far been impressed with the changes congressional lawmakers have made in the latest discussion draft of the market-structure bill that is built on the back of the previous session’s Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), calling it «much more practical, workable and streamlined.» She praised its approach to getting multiple types of transactions under the reach of single trading platforms and also its views on blockchain maturity.

She said that the legislation underway in Congress right now will be a «huge unlock» for the industry, but the U.S. financial agencies, including the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are already moving.

«Even the regulators are recognizing how blockchains can be used to create better architecture for the capital markets,» she said. «So the question is, how can we start to incorporate that capital technology in a way that makes markets more efficient and transparent and fair?»

She worked enforcement cases at the SEC and argues that many of those involving broker misconduct, market manipulation and fraudulent reporting could have been prevented if transactions were live and transparent, with fewer intermediaries required.

«Much of the industry has been begging for regulatory clarity for years, not just because being under the constant threat of enforcement action or even criminal charges is no way to regulate an industry, but because having a clear regime in place makes it easier to distinguish between good and bad actors,» she said, noting that the having clearly understood regulations can often be as important as their content, because uncertainty carries more hazards for business than compliance hurdles.

«Sometimes the clarity is more important than what the laws actually say, because businesses will find a way to work with that,» she said.

Le expects U.S. lawmakers will also build in new resources for the markets regulators as they take on the crypto oversight, but those agencies will also have to expand their expertise, because you «can’t regulate what you don’t understand.»

«The CFTC, in particular, if it’s going to be getting a lot of this new authority over crypto spot markets, is really going to need to be better resourced,» she noted. «They just are not there right now.»

Crypto legislation is a top priority on Capitol Hill — despite some setbacks as politics and President Donald Trump’s own crypto interests have interfered with its path.

«The wind is really at the industry’s back right now, and if we can get legislation right, it’s really going to unleash a golden age of financial innovation,» Le said.

Read More: Former SEC Chief Counsel Says Agency Needs to Make Clear Its Crypto Compliance Rules

Stablecoins are on the verge of mainstream adoption this year as the Trump administration pushes ahead with landmark crypto legislation, investment bank Deutsche Bank said in a research report Monday.

Despite some resistance in the Senate last week, the bank said it still expects to see some progress on the stablecoin regulatory front this year.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is tied to another asset, such as the U.S. dollar or gold. They play a major role in cryptocurrency markets and are also used to transfer money internationally.

The Senate’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act mandates federal regulation for stablecoins with a market cap of over $10 billion with the potential for state regulation if it aligns with federal rules. The House of Representatives’ STABLE Act calls for state regulation without any conditions.

Stablecoin market cap has exploded in the last five years. Total stablecoin market cap is currently $246 billion, a massive jump from the $20 billion seen in 2020, the German bank noted. The largest, Tether’s USDT, has a market cap of around $150 billion.

Stablecoins now «power over two-thirds of crypto trading, offering unmatched speed, 24/7 access, low-cost programmable payments,» analysts Marion Laboure and Camilla Siazon wrote.

Stablecoins are increasingly becoming strategic assets, the report said. «With 83% pegged to the U.S. dollar and Tether ranking amongst the largest holders of U.S. Treasuries, they’re reinforcing dollar dominance in a fragmenting world.»

The Genius Act is expected to be passed in the U.S. in the coming months, and that could trigger an almost 10-fold jump in stablecoin supply, investment bank Standard Chartered said in a research report last month.

Read more: Stablecoins Will Expand Beyond Crypto Trading, Become Part of Mainstream Economy, Citi Predicts

After the successful deployment last week of Pectra, Ethereum’s biggest upgrade in more than a year, the network’s core developers are already shifting focus to the next major chain upgrade: Fusaka.

Pectra, the biggest code change to Ethereum since the Merge in 2022, introduced key changes aimed at making staking easier for institutions, improving wallet accessibility, and boosting transaction efficiency.

Developers have already begun planning for Fusaka, the network’s next upgrade, and have thus far agreed to include an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) called «PeerDAS» that could help the network support larger «blobs» of transaction data.

Blobs, introduced during the Dencun upgrade, are dedicated spaces for large chunks of data related to transactions. They are stored off-chain, which reduces congestion on the Ethereum blockchain and lowers gas fees. The blobs are crucial for the growing layer-2 ecosystem built on top of Ethereum, such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Coinbase’s Base, which process transactions more quickly and at lower costs than the main chain.

PeerDAS, which stands for Peer Data Availability Sampling, would let validators download partial data from blobs instead of full blobs to validate whether the data has been posted to the network.

In theory, PeerDAS could reduce layer-2 transaction costs and benefit institutions operating validators on the Ethereum blockchain.

“PeerDAS is super important since we want to help layer-2s scale,” said Parithosh Jayanti, a devops engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, to CoinDesk over Telegram. “PeerDAS allows us to bump the blob limit significantly.»

Fusaka is scheduled to go live at the end of 2025 and will eventually include a bundle of additional upgrades beyond PeerDAS. However, Ethereum developers are notorious for delaying their upgrades.

Pectra was initially set for release at the end of 2024 but was postponed to the first quarter of 2025. After a few faulty tests, the developers further delayed the upgrade to May.

Ethereum developers have been criticized over the past year for not implementing protocol changes quickly enough. As the price of the network’s token has lagged in recent months and developers have migrated to competing ecosystems, the chain’s community has debated whether its unofficial leader — the non-profit Ethereum Foundation — is to blame.

Read more: Ethereum Developers Lock in May 7 for Pectra Upgrade