Apex Group CEO Peter Hughes says the Clarity Act's Senate failure hands Asia, the Middle East and Bermuda the edge, as his $3.5 trillion firm bets on Saudi tokenization

The United States' failure to pass the Clarity Act is handing digital-asset business to Asia, the Middle East and Bermuda, Peter Hughes, founder and chief executive of Apex Group, told CoinDesk in an interview published on October 24.

Apex is a financial firm based in Bermuda that services more than $3.5 trillion in assets across 50 jurisdictions, CoinDesk said. Hughes argued that the delay in Washington will push firms toward faster-moving jurisdictions that will "step into this gap", and said: "I think that the Clarity Act and the delay around that will lead to people finding other solutions elsewhere."

On September 15 a Senate cloture vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act fell short of the 60 votes needed, after 126 changes requested by Democrats failed to secure enough of their votes, Bitcoin.com News reported. The SEC and CFTC have moved ahead with their own crypto rules, CoinDesk said.

Hughes said Europe will not pick up the business, describing the EU's MiCA regime as slow to evolve and restrictive. He pointed instead to Saudi Arabia, which he said is opening its real-estate market to digital assets and foreign investment. Earlier in October, Apex announced a partnership with droppRWA and Tokeny to turn real-world assets into regulated blockchain-based investment products, starting there.

He also suggested that US banks had shaped the Clarity and GENIUS Act debates to protect deposits from stablecoin rewards, and said tokenized money-market funds that can double as collateral are among the biggest drivers of institutional adoption, though on timing for yield-bearing stablecoins in corporate treasuries, "whether that happens in one, three, or five years, it's hard to judge".