CFTC Draft Reaches the White House

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has formally begun building a rulebook for digital assets without waiting for Congress, sending a draft regulation on crypto asset transactions and markets to the White House for review on Sept. 17. The filing, submitted under the title “Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets,” now sits with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the White House office that vets federal rules and coordinates input from other agencies before they are made public.

Its prerule designation marks the earliest phase of the U.S. rulemaking process: no text has been published, and which assets, platforms, and intermediaries it would cover remains unknown. The timing is pointed. The submission arrived two days after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would have divided digital-asset oversight between the CFTC and the SEC and that fell at 49 votes to 50. With the bill stalled, agency rulebooks now stand to define how U.S. crypto markets are supervised.

What the Draft May Cover

The official record assigns the filing the code RIN 3038-AF80 — the Regulation Identifier Number that tracks a rulemaking through the federal process — and lists it as pending OIRA review, a stage that precedes any formal proposal. Its likely shape can be read from remarks CFTC Chair Michael Selig delivered on Aug. 20 to the agency's Innovation Advisory Committee: codify the commission's view of crypto market structure, and allow existing registrants, together with some currently unregistered exchanges, to be designated as “crypto asset markets,” a special class of designated contract market — the registration category the CFTC uses for venues listing futures and options — in which leveraged and margined digital-asset trading could operate under direct CFTC supervision.

The draft is also expected to address when retail commodity transactions qualify for the “actual delivery” exemption, which permits settlement outside registered venues. That question shapes how retail-facing platforms structure their offerings.

Chairs V to Press On

Both chairs made clear their agencies will not pause. The day after the vote, Selig wrote on X that the CFTC is “locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance,” while SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the securities regulator would advance “with or without legislation.” Each agency acted the following day: the CFTC with its software relief, and the SEC with its tokenized-stock exemptions.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong added that regulators already hold “the tools they need to create clear rules under existing” and predicted they would begin work “in earnest.” In his words, “clarity is coming to crypto regardless,” a view the White House filing now makes concrete.

Relief for Wallet Software

The CFTC paired the filing with immediate relief. A no-action letter published Friday, detailed in the agency's official press release, lets providers of passive software, including crypto wallet apps, connect users to regulated derivatives markets without registering as introducing brokers — the intermediaries that solicit and route customer orders to trading venues. No-action letters are the agency's assurance that it will not pursue enforcement for the activity described. Providers may market specific contracts and collect transaction-based fees, but they cannot hold customer assets, generate buy or sell signals of the kind an AI trading bot would produce, or control how orders are routed and executed.

The relief carries conditions: risk disclosures, recordkeeping, and compliance with marketing rules. It remains in force until the CFTC adopts rules or guidance on registration requirements for software developers.

SEC Opens a Tokenized-Stock Lane

The SEC moved on the same front. On Thursday, it issued an “innovation exemption” giving qualifying platforms a five-year conditional path to offer onchain trading of certain tokenized U.S. stocks — traditional equities represented as blockchain tokens — without registering as national securities exchanges. The move pulls tokenized equities onto blockchain rails that until now belonged mainly to decentralized finance and Bitcoin DeFi experiments. The step complements the CFTC's filing rather than competing with it: one agency builds a derivatives framework, while the other opens an equities lane.

Hyperliquid Policy Center CEO Jake Chervinsky, responding to the OIRA record, said the CFTC “is moving fast” and appears to have sent a rule proposal into interagency review, an assessment consistent with the filing's Sept. 17 receipt date.

Prerule, Not Policy, Yet

The prerule is best understood as process, not policy. A prerule is a proposal in gestation: after OIRA completes its review, the draft returns to the commission for a vote to issue a proposed rule, which then opens a public comment period, and a further vote is required before anything takes effect. Nothing binds exchanges or traders today, and the CFTC has declined to comment on the document's contents. The next markers to watch, then, are the end of OIRA's review and a commission vote to issue a proposal — the point at which the draft's text and its coverage would finally become public.

Still, with the CLARITY Act stalled and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent having previously flagged agency rulemaking as the fallback, the filing is the nearest thing U.S. crypto markets have to a regulatory timeline. Bitcoin (BTC) and every other asset now await rules that will be written in Washington, not on Capitol Hill.