Crypto Legal Developments for Private Equity and Commercial Finance Practitioners
American Bar Association, Business Law Section Spring Meeting 2026
Hosted by Financial Services Technology Joint Subcommittee (Business Law Section)
Chanté Eliaszadeh — Panelist
Discussion
At the ABA Business Law Section's 2026 Spring Meeting, I served as a panelist for the Financial Services Technology Joint Subcommittee's session — chaired by David M. Adlerstein of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — surveying the crypto legal developments most consequential for private equity and commercial-finance practitioners. The panel worked through the year's structural shifts across stablecoins, digital-asset market structure, token taxonomy, real-world-asset tokenization, DeFi, and the deal environment.
My contribution centered on the areas closest to my practice. On stablecoins, I addressed what the GENIUS Act's federal framework changes for deal and finance lawyers now — the unresolved questions around yield, the growing traditional-finance entry into the space, and emerging use cases tied to agentic-AI payment flows. On token taxonomy, I walked through how the SEC's post-Howey thinking has evolved and where the new guidance does — and does not — draw workable boundaries between securities, commodities, and payment tokens, and how practitioners should advise clients while those gaps persist.
The broader conversation reached market structure (whether the CLARITY Act meaningfully resolves the SEC/CFTC allocation), the readiness of tokenization for mainstream private-equity and private-credit transactions, the place of pure DeFi and DAOs amid the sector's institutionalization, and the state of the deal environment — digital-asset treasury vehicles, M&A, and IPOs.
Panel Roster
- Moderator
- David M. Adlerstein — Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
- Panelists
- R. Patrick Quinn — Former bank general counsel (Traditional-finance perspective on crypto)
- Alan Gitelman — Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (JD Candidate 2026 — federal legislative developments)
Topics Covered
- Stablecoins
- GENIUS Act
- CLARITY Act
- Digital asset market structure
- SEC vs. CFTC jurisdiction
- Token taxonomy
- Howey test
- Real-world asset tokenization
- DeFi and DAOs
- Crypto M&A and deal environment
Related Analysis on astraea.law
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The GENIUS Act became law in July 2025, but its compliance cliff is January 18, 2027—and the implementing rules are still in proposed form. Here is what stablecoin issuers should be doing now, and the facts the early commentary got wrong.
The CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633) Explained: How It Would Split SEC and CFTC Jurisdiction
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Federal vs. State Stablecoin Regulation: Choosing Your Registration Path
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