CFTC Kicks Off Crypto Rulemaking, Bypassing a Stalled Congress

In brief

The CFTC sent a prerule titled “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets” to the White House’s OIRA for review.
As an early-stage prerule, the text isn’t public yet, but the move signals the CFTC intends to regulate crypto derivatives without waiting for Congress, days after the Clarity Act failed its Senate cloture vote.
Both the CFTC and SEC are pressing ahead: The SEC issued a new tokenized-stock “innovation exemption” and the CFTC released no-action relief for crypto trading apps.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is pushing ahead with its own crypto rulebook, sending a pair of digital-asset rulemakings to the White House for review just days after the Clarity Act collapsed in the Senate.

According to a filing posted this week, the CFTC submitted a prerule titled “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets” to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office that vets federal rules before agencies release them.

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As a prerule, the filing marks an early phase in the rulemaking process rather than a finished regulation, and OIRA review is a procedural step that precedes public release. The agency has not yet made the text public, so the specific provisions remain unclear.

The move signals the CFTC intends to build a framework for crypto derivatives on its own authority rather than wait for Congress. That urgency stems from Tuesday’s failed cloture vote on the Clarity Act, the market-structure bill that would have established federal rules for digital assets and split oversight between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The bill fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance, and lead negotiator Sen. Cynthia Lummis called its chances all but dead this year, though others have since signaled they intend to push the bill forward regardless of the shortened legislative calendar with midterm elections on the horizon.

Meanwhile, both the CFTC and SEC have signaled they won’t sit idle.

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Regulators have doubled down on crypto initiatives in the wake of the bill’s failure, with the SEC rolling out an “innovation exemption” this week that lets qualifying venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks natively on blockchain networks without registering as national exchanges.

The CFTC has been active on other fronts, too. The agency recently issued no-action relief allowing certain software providers, including crypto wallet apps, to offer users access to regulated derivatives without registering as introducing brokers.

Regulators have described their rulemaking push as a bridge toward eventual legislation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has previously pointed to agency rulemaking as the fallback if the Clarity Act stalls, leaving it the nearest thing to a regulatory timeline U.S. crypto markets have for now.