The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is advancing its own crypto rulebook, submitting preliminary rulemakings to the White House for review days after the Clarity Act collapsed in the Senate.
The CFTC sent 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 reviews federal regulations before agencies release them. As a prerule, the filing represents an early phase in the rulemaking process rather than a finished regulation, and the specific provisions remain unclear pending public release.
The Clarity Act, a market-structure bill that would have established federal rules for digital assets and split oversight between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, failed to advance after falling short of the 60 votes needed for a cloture vote on Tuesday. Lead negotiator Sen. Cynthia Lummis described the bill's chances as all but dead this year, though others have signaled intent to push it forward despite the compressed legislative calendar ahead of midterm elections.
The CFTC's move signals the agency intends to build a framework for crypto derivatives on its own authority rather than wait for Congress. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has previously identified agency rulemaking as a fallback option if legislation stalls, making it the nearest regulatory timeline available for U.S. crypto markets currently.
Both the CFTC and SEC have doubled down on crypto initiatives following the bill's failure. The SEC this week rolled out an "innovation exemption" allowing qualifying venues to trade tokenized U.S. stocks natively on blockchain networks without registering as national exchanges. The CFTC recently issued no-action relief permitting certain software providers, including crypto wallet apps, to offer users access to regulated derivatives without registering as introducing brokers.
