CFTC Sends Crypto Rulemakings to White House, Pressing Ahead Without Congress
A prerule on crypto asset transactions and markets reached OIRA days after the Clarity Act failed in the Senate, as regulators fill a gap left by stalled legislation.
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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has taken its first formal step toward writing U.S. crypto rules on its own, submitting draft rulemakings for White House review within days of the Senate failing to advance the Clarity Act. The filing positions the agency to build a derivatives framework by itself while the market-structure bill sits in limbo.
According to Decrypt, which reviewed the filing, the CFTC sent a document called "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets" to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. OIRA is the White House office that screens federal rules before agencies publish them, and its review of a prerule signals early-stage work rather than a finished regulation. The CFTC has not released the text, so the substance of the proposals is not yet known.
The timing matters. On Tuesday, the Senate fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the Clarity Act, which would have created federal digital-asset rules and divided oversight between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, who led negotiations on the bill, said its prospects for this year were effectively gone — though several lawmakers have indicated they plan to keep working on it despite a legislative calendar increasingly squeezed by midterm elections.
With legislation stalled, agency rulemaking now carries the weight of near-term regulatory planning. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had previously flagged rulemaking as the fallback if the bill stalled, and the CFTC's filing puts that fallback into motion.
Regulators act while Congress stalls
The CFTC is not the only agency moving. This week the SEC introduced an "innovation exemption" allowing qualifying venues to trade tokenized U.S. stocks directly on blockchain networks without registering as national exchanges. Separately, the CFTC issued no-action relief for certain software providers — crypto wallet apps among them — letting them give users access to regulated derivatives without becoming registered introducing brokers.
Officials have cast these efforts as a bridge toward eventual legislation rather than a replacement for it. For now, though, the prerule at OIRA represents the closest thing U.S. crypto markets have to a regulatory timeline.
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