In late July 2026, three seemingly separate actions pushed digital assets from the gray area toward the institutional center: In Europe, ten financial institutions including ING and DZ BANK quietly banded together to register the RL1 blockchain cooperative in Luxembourg, taking over the infrastructure built by the German company SWIAT, preparing to operate a private permissioned chain that solely focuses on "tokenized assets in regulated financial markets"; in Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security proposed the draft "Electronic Identification and Authentication Law," which incorporates digital assets alongside databases, images, and videos into "digital resources," intending to anchor them technically and legally by referencing the "Digital Technology Industry Law," directly tying the future flow of assets to identity verification and law enforcement systems; across the Atlantic, the legislative battle surrounding the "Clarity Act" in the United States heated up, with major Wall Street institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and SoFi rarely speaking in unison to call for clear federal legislation that delineates "who governs which assets" in light of the blurred boundaries between the SEC and CFTC. These three threads outline three paths: the "permissioned chain route," led by large financial institutions, reshaping underlying infrastructures within existing regulatory frameworks; the "identity governance route," led by law enforcement agencies, embedding digital assets into identity and public safety systems; and the "legislative game route," where capital market giants lobby Congress to redraw the regulatory landscape through asset classification. In this rewriting of rules, the authority to write the rules is shifting, inevitably pointing in one direction: the compliance boundaries for project parties, platforms, and funding are collectively raised rather than loosened.
Ten EU Banks Unite on Blockchain: RL1 Locks in Compliance Tokenization Track
The "permissioned chain route" in Europe now has a highly symbolic vehicle: RL1. It is not a traditional company, but a blockchain cooperative registered in Luxembourg, founded by around ten financial institutions, including ING, Cecabank, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, DekaBank, DZ BANK, LBBW, Natixis CIB, to SC Ventures, Seturion, and more, all of which have their names written into its charter. The underlying technology comes from the German fintech company SWIAT, which built the infrastructure a few years ago and has now fully transferred the ownership of the relevant network to the cooperative, with members reportedly holding roughly equal governance rights. Formally, this is an ownership restructuring where "tech company exits, and banks collectively take over"; fundamentally, it locks the tokenized ledger, nodes, and operational rules tightly within a fence guarded by licensed institutions.
RL1 is positioned as a private permissioned chain that specifically serves the issuance and settlement of tokenized assets in regulated financial markets, naturally interfacing with the previously passed EU MiCA framework: since assets and service providers are subject to tiered regulation, the safest approach is to lock core infrastructures like custody and settlement within a network that is "visible to regulators, controllable in membership, and has its own technology stack." The cooperative structure ensures no single bank monopolizes the control of the chain; the permissioned chain model ensures that entrants must meet existing regulatory identities. The direct consequence of this dual design is that within Europe, those tokenized assets seeking compliance pathways are more likely to be directed towards closed networks like RL1 rather than fully open public chains or DeFi protocols, even if public chains can still accommodate some marginal or innovative businesses, the "main battlefield" for mainstream financial assets is being quietly rewritten by these permissioned chains led by major banks with clear compliance labels.
From KYC to Asset Fingerprints: Vietnam Writes Digital Assets into Electronic Identity
If European banks are redefining the boundaries of "compliant assets" on a permissioned chain, the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security has simply drawn those boundaries into every citizen's electronic identity system. The latest publicly released draft of the "Electronic Identification and Authentication Law" directly includes "products, goods, devices, databases, documents, images, videos, and digital assets as digital resources," and clearly proposes to reference the "Digital Technology Industry Law" to define the technical and legal attributes of digital assets. Formally, this merely adds another category, but substantially it pulls digital assets into a unified legal framework for the digital economy: in the future, any asset recognized as "digital resources" may be tracked and invoked within the same identity verification, data sharing, and law enforcement processes.
The path design has also revealed the true focus of regulatory concern. The draft, led by the Ministry of Public Security and positioned within the foundational system of electronic identity rather than a separate financial or tax regulation, indicates that the "identifiability" of digital assets will primarily serve identity management, public safety, and cross-system data invocation. Once a closed loop of definitions is formed between the "Electronic Identification and Authentication Law" and the "Digital Technology Industry Law," tax authorities, law enforcement, and other administrative systems will have the legal justification to map a particular digital asset activity to a specific "electronic identity account." Even if the current draft is still in the proposal and review stage, and the specific implementation details and technical standards have yet to be made public, how to technically map an address or account to a "digital resource holder" remains unclear, but the direction is quite clear: for local users, the anonymous space for holding and trading will be continuously compressed; for service providers, in the future, if they want to gain policy space, they must accept the premise that asset records are incorporated into the national electronic identity system, trading more room for visibility for a relatively stable compliance pathway.
Wall Street Backs the Clarity Act for Unified Rules
If Vietnam is writing "who is using the assets" into the identity system, the United States is currently contending over "what exactly is this thing, and who governs it." When the "Clarity Act" was placed on Congress's table, its core demand boiled down to two points: to provide a relatively clear legal classification for digital assets at the federal level and to delineate the regulatory powers of institutions such as the SEC and CFTC based on this. The reality is that under a multi-headed regulatory landscape, some tokens are viewed both as potential securities and as potential commodities, with project parties and intermediaries long navigating a gray area over "whether they are crossing the line," while even the boundaries between law enforcement agencies remain unclear; the core of compliance proposals often revolves not around product design, but around whose definitions hold more sway.
What truly transformed this bill from a technical discussion into a political event is Wall Street's collective stance. Around July 2026, several large asset management and brokerage firms, including BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and SoFi, publicly supported the "Clarity Act," calling on Congress to promote its passage as soon as possible (according to a single source). This is not merely "interest in something new," but a clear expression of a demand from these institutions, managing trillion-dollar traditional assets: they need a predictable compliance pathway, a unified rule that can be explained to boards, auditors, and regulators within the framework of investor protection. For them, the absence of classification means that issuing a new product requires navigating back and forth between the SEC and CFTC, and if they step wrong, it could shift from "innovation" to regulatory risk. The problem is that the "Clarity Act" is still deeply entangled in the congressional legislative process, with no public conclusion on committee review pace, bipartisan support levels, or final voting timing; the only certainty is that Wall Street's lobbying power is accelerating the pace of "writing rules into codified law" into the spotlight, and whether this power can truly end the ambiguity surrounding U.S. digital asset regulation will determine whether global compliant capital is willing to lock large-scale funds in this asset category long-term in the coming years.
Institutional Competition of Permissioned Chains, Identity Legislation, and Federal Law
If this round of rule rewriting is viewed as an institutional competition, the EU, Vietnam, and the United States have chosen three completely different levers. The ten financial institutions in Europe have established the RL1 cooperative in Luxembourg, operating a private permissioned chain aimed at tokenized assets in regulated financial markets based on the infrastructure transferred from SWIAT, essentially digging another layer down after MiCA, turning the chain itself into an infrastructure entry point that only regulated banks, custodians, and compliant issuers can access; who can enter the chain is no longer determined by technical openness, but by the license list.
Vietnam, on the other hand, has placed its breakthrough on the "human" end. The draft "Electronic Identification and Authentication Law," led by the Ministry of Public Security, includes digital assets along with images, videos, databases in the scope of "digital resources," and proposes to reference the "Digital Technology Industry Law" to define their attributes, meaning that in the future, every citizen's electronic identity may become an anchor point for recognizing, tracking, taxing, and holding accountable their on-chain assets, directly affecting ordinary users and the local platforms and tech companies providing services around them. The U.S. remains focused on capital markets as the main battlefield, with the "Clarity Act" attempting to draw lines at the federal level between security-type and commodity-type digital assets, alleviating the issues of blurred boundaries between SEC, CFTC and other institutions, and Wall Street’s large asset management firms, issuers, and trading platforms bet on: as long as classification is clear, products can find "shelf space" within the existing regulatory framework, institutional funds will have the opportunity for systematic entry.
Therefore, the landing points of these three paths are clearly visible: the EU controls the chain itself through infrastructure, Vietnam controls the binding of "people + assets" through identity and data governance, and the US controls asset forms through market and product rules. The common outcome is the reclassification of on-chain assets into two categories: one that can enter the books of regulated institutions, and another that is left in the gray area outside regulation, while the space for public chains and decentralized protocols to carry institutional assets is compressed, they will not disappear from the stage in the short term as containers for assets outside of regulation and innovation experimentation.
After Raising Compliance Red Lines: Next Steps for Project Parties, Platforms, and Users
As chains become bifurcated and identities take the stage, compliance is no longer a single choice of "whether there is a license," but a full-chain game from the underlying chain selection, asset forms, and disclosure design, to the binding methods of user identities and data. For project parties and platforms, the paths are essentially laid out on the table: one path is to align with permissioned chains like RL1 that are led by major financial institutions, reserving integration space in technical architecture and governance models, enabling future assets to be recorded in the books of regulated entities; another path is to anticipate a Vietnamese-style electronic identity approach in markets like Southeast Asia, reserving interfaces for the strong binding of "people + assets" and designing the capability to link wallets, accounts, KYC, and electronic identity verification systems as infrastructure; the third path is to treat the asset classification and federal regulatory power division proposed by the "Clarity Act" as "expected standards," aligning as much as possible in rights design of tokens, information disclosure, and circulation structure, so that regardless of the final direction of the bill, they can minimize legal and licensing risks when the regulation lands in the U.S. However, the key uncertainty is also written into these three paths: RL1 has not yet publicly disclosed specific launch times, the types of assets supported in the first batch, and governance voting details, meaning that before institutions can truly migrate assets on a large scale to permissioned chains, there will inevitably be a transitional period dominated by pilot projects and small-scale experiments; the draft "Electronic Identification and Authentication Law" in Vietnam is still under review, and the technical standards for recognizing digital assets and the scope of data sharing remain undecided, making it difficult for project parties to accurately predict the technical boundaries of "identity on-chain"; and the pace of advancement of the "Clarity Act" in the U.S. Congress, the attitudes of both parties, and the final terms of content are also undecided, making it impossible to assume it will pass or when it will pass. Therefore, during this period of regulatory ambiguity, the only truly feasible strategy is to design compliance reservations according to the potential highest standards, turning the timing and multiplicity of the institutionalization of these three paths into a decisive variable for reshaping institutional funding and user behavior in the next round.
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