Five Crypto Projects That Stand to Benefit From the Senate’s New Market Structure Bill

Brace yourselves: there’s a new piece of U.S. crypto regulation coming, this time in the form of the Senate’s revised market structure bill. The good news, for the web3 industry, is that like other recent pieces of legislation such as the GENIUS Act, this one is designed to support innovation rather than stifle it.

In years gone by, it seemed that every piece of U.S. crypto legislation was designed to add complexity and greater restrictions on what blockchain companies could and couldn’t do. But under the current crypto-friendly administration, blockchain is no longer the enemy – it’s the ally. As a result, forthcoming attempts at industry regulation are to be broadly welcomed – provided they add clarity and empower companies to build cool stuff.

What’s Inside the Market Structure Bill?

The latest version of the Senate’s market structure bill is a wide-ranging piece of legislation. The current draft of the Responsible Financial Innovation Act of 2025, to use its formal title, aims to establish a clearer regulatory framework for digital assets by addressing jurisdictional overlaps between the SEC and CFTC. Key provisions include the creation of a Joint Advisory Committee on Digital Assets to recommend regulatory harmonization, with suggestions that agencies must publicly justify accepting or rejecting.

Other key provisions include deeming that staking rewards, airdrops, and liquid-staking outputs do not constitute securities. And in good news for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs), their utility tokens are also exempt from securities laws provided they meet decentralization criteria.

The bill also provides protections for DeFi developers and users, who can operate decentralized exchanges, validator nodes, liquidity pools, wallets, or messaging protocols without triggering anti-money-laundering regulations. Additionally, the SEC and CFTC are directed to conduct a joint study on tokenizing real-world assets to foster innovation while reducing turf wars. Virtually all web3 projects stand to benefit from the market structure bill, should it pass in its current form – with the following five ranking among the clear winners.

World Mobile: DePIN for the People

The fact that the market structure bill both acknowledges DePIN and adds provisions to protect it attests to just how big decentralized physical infrastructure networks have become – a $19B sector and rising. More than arguably any other onchain vertical, DePIN’s various utility tokens have genuine utility because they support the two-sided marketplace that connects resource suppliers and consumers. World Mobile is poised to be one of the prime beneficiaries here.

Not only is a significant number of its two million users based in the U.S., which is one of the regions its cellular data network covers, but World Mobile’s $WMTx token is a pure DePIN utility token. Powered by a dedicated blockchain network in the form of World Mobile Chain, the project aims to take on the telecom monopolies, supplying affordable coverage with the aid of user-controlled nodes. If the Senate’s latest crypto bill passes, it will lift the entire DePIN sector – particularly projects such as World Mobile that already have the infra and the user base in place.

Centrifuge: RWAs on Tap

The other major onchain sector that’s certain to prosper under the market structure bill is tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). The bill instructs the SEC and CFTC to host a joint study on tokenizing real-world assets, addressing such issues as custody, audits, and fraud prevention. Because the RWA industry has been compliant from the get-go, it already has its house in order. This means that complying with any new legislation should carry minimal burden: they just need to tick the right boxes and keep doing their thing.

The bill’s passage is sure to be welcomed by established RWA players such as Centrifuge, whose asset tokenization infra has seen wide adoption across the industry, with more than 1,700 assets given the RWA treatment to date. Its full management system enables companies to issue tokenized assets without needing to build bespoke solutions from scratch: Centrifuge’s plug-and-play framework takes care of it all, compliance included. This is the future of RWA tokenization and it’s about to get a leg up should the Senate’s legislation be given the green light.

Coinbase: Staking as a Service

It’s not just decentralized projects that stand to benefit from the market structure bill – so do several of its largest centralized companies, exchanges especially. In the past, the likes of Coinbase and Kraken got embroiled in legals spat with the then-heavy-handed SEC concerning their right to offer staking products. While that dispute has now been settled, aided by a less combative SEC and crypto-friendly administration, the new bill would give staking the all-clear.

Exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance have made network staking, which they administer, overseeing rewards distribution on behalf of their customers, a core part of their business. The ability to offer staking products without fearing the creeping specter of regulatory enforcement will take a weight off their shoulders. It’ll enable them to focus on improving product without getting sidelined by onerous compliance burdens and retaining armies of lawyers. The bill might also enable the likes of Coinbase to support airdrops for protocols whose tokens they already list.

Aave: DeFi Lending Everywhere

Aave is clearly going to do well out of the market structure bill, and so should its native token, but you could just as easily swap its name out for Uniswap or Curve or any other major DeFi player. If you’re operating a protocol – and its design and token distribution are actually decentralized – the Senate’s latest piece of legislation is very good news.

There’s long been a fear that DeFi would eventually get reined in by regulators like the rest of the industry, mandating KYC and onerous compliance checks. Not only has that failed to happen, but the industry appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Under the terms of the draft bill, operating a decentralized exchange or automated protocol such as Aave won’t require adhering to broker-dealer or AML regulations.

Aave famously tried going down the compliant route with its institutional Aave Arc product, but it didn’t get far. Now that DeFi companies are on the verge of gaining greater clarity, they should be free to focus on core competencies: creating novel solutions that deliver new opportunities for trading, lending, saving, and earning. It would have seemed unlikely a couple of years ago, but the Senate’s latest legislation might actually keep DeFi decentralized.

OpenSea: NFT Revival

OpenSea is famous for several things. Firstly for being the marketplace that mainstreamed NFTs. Secondly, for then conspiring to lose its dominance through a series of missteps that alienated its community. And thirdly – and closely related to point two – in teasing the great airdrop that never was. To cut the OpenSea team some slack, however, their prevarication over whether to airdrop users a native token – and the mechanics of doing so – can largely be attributed to regulatory uncertainty. As a U.S. company, OpenSea has to tread more carefully than most crypto businesses.

The market structure bill should not only enable OpenSea to proceed with its airdrop – assuming that’s still in their roadmap – but to get back to innovating. Because few would dispute the ability of OpenSea to engineer awesome products: when it comes to development, they are to NFTs what Uniswap are to DeFi. Their shadow still looms large over the industry, and a revitalized OpenSea wouldn’t just put the company back on the map – it would make NFTs great again.

Good Bill Is Good

Every proposed piece of legislation must be scrutinized closely to ensure that it not only achieves its desired aims, but that these aims are in themselves desirable. On surface inspection, however, there’s a lot to like about the Senate’s market structure bill, although a coalition of crypto industry players has criticized draft versions for not going far enough, it should be noted. They argue that without stronger safeguards against SEC enforcement actions for activities like running nodes or liquidity pools, domestic blockchain talent will continue to flee abroad.

You can’t please everyone, of course, and there’ll likely be more horsetrading to come before the bill finally becomes law. But as it stands, this much can be asserted with confidence: the market structure act will prove a net good for the crypto industry, particularly for the sectors singled out for attention. From RWAs to DePIN and CeFi to DeFi, the bill leaves few sectors unspared in its quest to bring greater regulatory clarity to the industry, allowing blockchain innovation – both American and overseas – to flourish.

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