CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said the crypto industry will get federal market structure rules whether or not Congress passes the Clarity Act, using authority the agency already holds rather than waiting on stalled legislation. The comments came at the inaugural meeting of the CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee on August 20, 2026, in Washington, where roughly 43 members — including the CEOs of Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, Gemini, Robinhood, Nasdaq, NYSE and CME — gathered to discuss crypto, artificial intelligence and prediction markets.
Selig has directed CFTC staff to begin exploring rules that would codify a CFTC-regulated market structure for crypto assets, potentially allowing both existing CFTC registrants and currently unregistered crypto exchanges to seek a new “crypto asset market” designation that would let them offer trading involving leverage or margin under rules built specifically for digital-asset markets.
A Hedge Against a Stalled Congress
The Clarity Act, the bill meant to establish comprehensive federal market structure for digital assets, needs 60 votes to clear the Senate and has stalled amid disputes over government ethics restrictions, stablecoin yield rules and DeFi protections. Selig has said he remains hopeful the bill reaches President Trump's desk, but the CFTC's parallel rulemaking effort functions as an explicit hedge: regulatory clarity that does not depend on Congress reaching agreement on the harder, more contested provisions. The push comes as crypto-adjacent legal fights continue to play out in parallel, including a recent ruling that kept Justin Sun's lawsuit against World Liberty Financial in open court rather than private arbitration.
Selig also said he has directed staff to engage directly with developers of on-chain finance protocols to work out how those protocols could operate legally and compliantly inside the United States — an outreach effort aimed at DeFi builders who have often found themselves without a clear regulatory home. Separately, he described a partnership with the SEC on “Project Crypto,” an effort to build a clear taxonomy distinguishing which crypto assets qualify as securities versus commodities.
AI and Compute as the Next Frontier
The meeting's agenda extended beyond crypto market structure to artificial intelligence, with Selig framing GPUs and computing power as an emerging category of digital commodity. He said transparent financial markets could help create reliable pricing benchmarks for compute capacity, positioning the CFTC to potentially play a role in AI infrastructure markets much as it already does in energy and agricultural commodities.
Related: UK Tax Authority Triples Crypto Warning Letters to Over 81,000
Whether the CFTC's self-directed rulemaking effort ultimately proves more durable than legislation remains an open question — agency rules can be rewritten by a future chair in a way an act of Congress cannot — but for an industry that has spent years operating without clear federal guardrails, even a hedge marks a meaningful shift in posture from the regulator.
