A viral warning from economist Peter St. Onge has spotlighted how an 89–10 Senate housing bill quietly folds in a temporary CBDC ban and reshapes the path for the CLARITY Act.

A viral alarm from Heritage Foundation economist Peter St. Onge is reigniting one of crypto’s most contested political fights in Congress: the prospect of a U.S. central bank digital currency. In a post on X that amassed 195,700 views and 3,600 likes by the afternoon of March 26, @profstonge warned that “Congress is trying to sneak a CBDC into their must-pass housing bill,” adding that such a currency “would replace the US dollar with a government-controlled crypto-token that 80% of voters reject.”

The bill in question, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, passed the Senate on March 12 by an overwhelming 89–10 margin. As reported by Yahoo Finance, the legislation is primarily a sweeping housing reform package crafted by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Senator Elizabeth Warren, covering everything from FHA loan limits to institutional investor restrictions on single-family homes. Buried within it, however, is Title X — a provision that bars the Federal Reserve and its regional banks from issuing or creating a digital dollar, or any asset substantially resembling one, through 2031.​

The inclusion was not accidental. According to Unchained Crypto, House conservatives pushed to embed anti-CBDC language into the legislation as a condition of broader bipartisan compromise, a strategy that allowed digital currency policy to advance without requiring a standalone crypto bill. The White House signaled support for the measure, with advisors recommending the president sign it if presented in its current form.​

The CBDC Provision Dividing Washington

The housing bill CBDC fight arrives alongside a parallel battle over the CLARITY Act, the digital asset market structure legislation that has stalled in the Senate over a separate stalemate on stablecoin yield. Coinbase withdrew support for an earlier CLARITY Act draft after proposed language would have banned passive yield on stablecoins — a provision the exchange said was worse than the status quo. Senator Cynthia Lummis has since said sticking points on stablecoin yield and DeFi provisions are “largely reached,” framing April 2026 as a critical legislative window.

A Temporary Ban or a Political Signal?

For CBDC opponents, the housing bill provision is less about the technical details of digital currency design and more about drawing a political line before midterm elections. As Ledger Insights noted, the ban expires at the end of 2030 — after Trump leaves office — leaving the door open for a future administration. The Federal Reserve, for its part, has consistently maintained it would not launch a digital dollar without explicit congressional authorization, framing its existing research as exploratory rather than developmental.​

Whether the CBDC provision survives a House-Senate conference process remains uncertain. House leaders have already indicated they are unlikely to accept the Senate version of the housing bill as written and may seek to renegotiate key provisions — including how long, and how broadly, any CBDC ban applies. As crypto.news previously reported, the Senate vote drew rare cross-aisle alignment, but that consensus may face pressure once negotiations with the House begin in earnest.

NYSE CPO Jon Herrick says blockchain should plug into existing rails like central clearing, as ICE’s OKX deal and SEC moves on tokenized stocks redraw market structure.

NYSE Chief Product Officer Jon Herrick on March 26 told the audience at the New York Digital Assets Summit that the world’s largest stock exchange has no intention of tearing down its existing market infrastructure to make way for blockchain — it intends to wire the two together. According to CoinDesk, Herrick said the NYSE is pursuing interoperability, exploring the application of tokenized assets within the current system, including real-time or near-real-time settlement and extended trading hours.

The position is a meaningful signal. NYSE is the most systemically significant equities venue on the planet, and Herrick’s framing — blockchain layered onto existing rails, not substituted for them — reflects how the exchange is navigating the practical and regulatory constraints of one of the most tightly supervised industries in finance. He noted that existing mechanisms such as central clearing still carry irreplaceable risk management value and should be preserved, even as the exchange pushes deeper into tokenization. As previously reported by crypto.news, the NYSE is already building a 24/7 blockchain-based trading venue for tokenized stocks and ETFs, pending SEC approval. The platform is designed to combine NYSE’s Pillar order-matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade settlement funded by stablecoins.

Herrick predicted that the boundary between traditional and tokenized assets may gradually dissolve over the next decade — a timeline that aligns with where institutional momentum is visibly heading. Morgan Stanley, as detailed in a previous crypto.news story, plans to enable tokenized stock settlement on its internal alternative trading system in the second half of 2026, while Nasdaq has already filed with the SEC to support tokenized equities on its public exchange.

ICE doubles down with OKX investment

The strategic backdrop to Herrick’s remarks is considerable. Earlier this month, ICE — NYSE’s parent company — made a strategic investment in OKX, valuing the crypto exchange at $25 billion and securing a board seat, as covered in a previous crypto.news story. Under the partnership, subject to regulatory approval, OKX’s 120 million users would gain access to ICE’s U.S. futures markets and NYSE tokenized equities. “Our strategic relationship with OKX will expand global retail access to ICE’s pre-eminent regulated markets and accelerate our plans to offer on-chain infrastructure and tokenized assets to U.S. investors,” said Jeffrey C. Sprecher, Chair and CEO of ICE, at the time of the announcement.

A market structure being redrawn

The tokenized equity market reached a market cap of roughly $800 million and $1.8 billion in monthly volume as of early 2026, still nascent by Wall Street standards but growing fast. The regulatory environment has also shifted: the SEC granted the DTCC a three-year window in late 2025 to custody tokenized securities, effectively clearing a path for broker-dealers to connect to on-chain settlement without abandoning the existing market structure.

Herrick’s interoperability-first philosophy — bridging old and new rather than replacing one with the other — may well prove to be the dominant model for how legacy exchanges absorb blockchain over the decade ahead.

U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, is questioning the limited “master account” obtained by crypto exchange Kraken from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which she said raises potential consumer-protection issues and questions about the approval process.

Waters, who is likely to return to the chairman seat on the committee if the Democrats regain a House majority in this year’s elections (set at an 84% chance in current bets on Polymarket), sent a Thursday letter to the president of the Kansas City arm of the Fed system, Jeff Schmid. She suggested that the unusual approval for a “limited purpose account” at Kraken, which allows the firm to become the first to win direct access to Federal Reserve payment services, is on unclear legal footing.

“The announcement raises questions about the approval because neither statute nor the Federal Reserve Board’s Account Access Guidelines refer to a ‘limited purpose account’ type,” she wrote in the letter. “Accordingly, I write to request that you clarify the terms of Kraken’s account access approval and provide additional information regarding the process and considerations informing the approval.”

The new account granted the U.S. firm full-fledged access to the same payment rails that much of the traditional financial system operates on. Several crypto-native firms have sought that access but are still awaiting approval, keeping a close eye on a separate effort at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington to write rules that could govern a “skinny” master account for such businesses. That process is still in the early stages.

When the Kansas City Fed was asked to comment on Waters’ queries, a spokesman said the bank has “received the letter and will review it.”

The regional bank in Kansas City — one of the 12 such banks nationwide — announced earlier this month that Kraken would get the long-sought-after access. Schmid said at the time that his bank was trying to maintain a system that “supports a level competitive field and reinforces the stability and resilience that has underpinned the Federal Reserve’s payment system offerings throughout its history.”

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