Apex Group CEO Says US Crypto Delays Give Asia and Middle East Regulatory Edge

United States delays in enacting comprehensive digital asset legislation risk shifting institutional market share to faster-moving jurisdictions across Asia, the Middle East, and Bermuda, according to Apex Group founder and Chief Executive Officer Peter Hughes ¹.

Speaking in an interview published on Oct. 24, Hughes said the legislative impasse following the failure of the Clarity Act leaves companies building blockchain-based financial products facing ongoing regulatory ambiguity ¹. The bill, which aimed to establish federal oversight guidelines and allocate supervisory responsibilities between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), failed to secure the necessary 60 votes in the US Senate in September ¹. Disagreements centered on ethics clauses, stablecoin reward structures, and broader oversight frameworks ¹. Following the legislative stall, both the SEC and CFTC introduced standalone regulatory proposals to address the statutory gap ¹.

Jurisdictional Competition and Asset Tokenization

Hughes noted that Europe is unlikely to capture significant business despite enacting its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), which he characterized as restrictive and slow to adapt ¹. Instead, jurisdictions including Saudi Arabia and Bermuda are positioning themselves to absorb capital by establishing clearer operating regimes ¹. In Saudi Arabia, regulators have modified frameworks to permit real estate tokenization and expanded foreign participation in domestic property ¹. Financial service provider Apex Group, which oversees more than $3.5 trillion in assets under administration across 50 jurisdictions, partnered earlier in October with tokenization platform droppRWA and infrastructure firm Tokeny to launch tokenized investment vehicles in the kingdom ¹.

Beyond statutory jurisdictions, Hughes identified tokenized money market funds and regulated yield-bearing stablecoins as central catalysts for institutional onboarding ¹. By investing in short-term debt instruments and issuing representation tokens on distributed ledgers, these vehicles can deliver higher payouts directly to capital allocators than conventional bank deposits—yielding an illustrative 5% compared to 3% at banks—while offering utility as collateral for institutional borrowing ¹. The debate in Washington comes against a broader market backdrop where $BTC traded at $80,487 and total digital asset capitalization sat at $2.67 trillion at the time of writing.