The Senate Banking Committee has spent two years arguing about whether digital assets should be regulated as securities or commodities. The argument has hardened along party lines. The market has not waited. My op-ed in the Washington Reporter argues that the doctrinal frame is what has to change.

The Howey test was written in 1946 to deal with orange groves sold as investment contracts. It asks whether a buyer expects profits from the efforts of others. For a token, the answer can change minute by minute as a protocol matures. Early-phase tokens sold to fund development look like securities. Later-phase tokens used to access a decentralized service look like commodities. The same code, the same buyer, the same wallet, classified two different ways depending on when you ask. The current framework cannot accommodate that fact, which is why every regulatory action has felt arbitrary.

The CLARITY Act offers a lifecycle-phase framework. Tokens are evaluated by what they do at the time of the transaction, in light of where the underlying protocol sits in its maturity. That moves the question from labels to function, and from political contest to administrable rule.

The op-ed makes the policy case in lay register. The doctrinal case lives in Replacing Howey with CLARITY: Resolving Securities Regulation’s Temporal Paradox, forthcoming in the Review of Banking & Financial Law at Boston University. The two pieces share thesis architecture.

Read the op-ed: End the Crypto Culture Wars with CLARITY (perma).