CFTC sends crypto market structure rulemaking to White House

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sent a crypto market structure rulemaking to the White House for review on Sept. 17, pressing ahead without Congress after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act.

The filing, titled Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets, was received by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Office of Management and Budget division that reviews federal regulations before publication. It is listed at the prerule stage, the earliest point in the regulatory pipeline, and discloses no details of the planned rules. The CFTC declined to comment.

Agencies move without a new law

The White House filing lands days after the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act in a procedural vote this week. The bill would have set up a federal framework for crypto markets. CFTC Chair Michael Selig had pre-committed to the fallback: in August he said he directed staff to begin exploring rules to codify a CFTC market structure for crypto assets using the agency’s existing authorities. The day after the Senate vote he posted on X that the agency was “locked in and ready to ship” rules for crypto markets.

In his August speech, Selig described a framework that could let current registrants as well as unregistered exchanges be designated a type of designated contract market called a crypto asset market, offering leveraged or margined trading under CFTC oversight. Those details come from the speech, not the filed document. He also said the framework could reach crypto wallets and trading interfaces offering perpetual and event contracts.

What happens next

The proposal stays at the prerule stage through the review. It faces potential revisions at the Office of Management and Budget, then a CFTC vote, a public comment period and a final rule that also requires commission approval.

The CFTC is not moving alone. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in a Sept. 16 post that the SEC will act “with or without legislation” within its statutory authority. The SEC separately granted temporary, conditional exemptive relief on Sept. 17 letting certain platforms trade tokenized stock without registering as exchanges, and the CFTC the same day issued a no-action position for developers of passive trading software.

Image: generated editorial illustration.