On September 24, three divisions of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — Market Participants, Market Oversight, and Clearing and Risk — updated the agency's digital-asset FAQ, per the official announcement, to confirm that futures commission merchants (FCMs) and derivatives clearing organizations (DCOs) may invest customer funds in tokenized forms of investments already permitted under the rules.

FCMs are the intermediaries that hold customer funds posted for futures trading, so the update effectively extends an established customer-protection regime onto blockchain rails without changing what the underlying investments may be.

The relief is deliberately narrow. A token qualifies only if the underlying asset is itself a permitted investment, the token confers legal and economic rights the same as or functionally equivalent to those of the traditional instrument, the holding respects the rule's liquidity, concentration and maturity limits, and the tokens are held at an acceptable depository. For tokenized government money market funds — blockchain representations of fund shares — CFTC staff expect a written acknowledgment letter from the fund's custodian.

The agency frames the update as an interpretation of existing obligations, not an approval of a new asset class. The was first published on March 20, and the September revision answers questions the earlier version left open. It also stops short of a blanket endorsement: a disallowed crypto asset does not become investable merely by being wrapped in a token.

Records Can Live Onchain

The second half of the update addresses where a firm's books may reside. CFTC Regulation 1.31, the general recordkeeping rule, and Regulation 45.2, which governs swap data records, are technology neutral: a registered firm can create and retain its required records on a blockchain, and staff said they would not object if the firm chose not to keep separate offchain copies. In effect, the staff position treats the chain itself as a compliant books-and-records venue rather than a system requiring a parallel paper trail.

Traditional obligations still apply. Most records must be preserved for five years and be producible to the CFTC, the National Futures Association or the Department of Justice on demand. Firms using a public, permissionless chain must maintain controls that allow them to produce records tied to any wallet address for inspection even if the network or its block explorer goes offline, while firms running private ledgers may not need dedicated offchain backups.

The FAQ notes that the recordkeeping questions surfaced in responses to a June 16 request for information issued under Executive Order 14405, which drew comments from dYdX Labs, the Blockchain Association and the Solana Policy Institute — a verifiability emphasis echoing what oracle networks such as Chainlink were built to provide for onchain data.

Stablecoins Still Excluded

Payment stablecoins remain outside the door. Staff made clear that the permitted-investment list under Regulation 1.25 was left unchanged, meaning futures brokers still may not place customer money directly into payment stablecoins, even as Washington warms to tokenized collateral more broadly. The upshot is a two-track treatment: under separate staff guidance a qualifying stablecoin can be posted as margin collateral, yet it still cannot sit in a broker's customer-fund portfolio. The list, revised in late 2024, covers US government securities, municipal securities, qualifying government money market funds, certain foreign sovereign debt and eligible US Treasury ETFs.

The update builds on a string of earlier moves. Staff guidance at the end of 2025 opened the door to Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and payment stablecoins as margin collateral for contract trading in the derivatives market, applying a 20% haircut to BTC and ETH proprietary positions and a 2% treatment for qualifying payment stablecoins. A staff letter allowing eligible futures brokers to accept certain non-security digital assets as customer margin was reissued in February 2026.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig welcomed the FAQ, saying staff had acted "consistent with the agency's ongoing efforts to provide regulatory clarity for the crypto industry." The push comes as the Clarity Act has stalled in the Senate, and Selig pledged on September 16 to write crypto rules under existing authority — the same infrastructure wave that has Circle's stablecoin-native layer-1, Arc, building around assets the list still excludes.

Staff Views, Not a Final Rule

The FAQ document itself states that it represents staff views and creates no new legal rights, rules or exemptions — as COINOTAG reported, this is staff interpretation rather than binding law. Its operational pull is nonetheless real: as of September 24, any FCM or DCO weighing tokenized permitted investments or onchain books has a concrete checklist, and supervisors have signaled they will not object. What remains unresolved is the stablecoin question, which only a Commission-level rule or legislation can settle.