CFTC chief says the agency will write crypto market structure rules regardless of Congress
Eight days after the US Senate blocked the Clarity Act, CFTC Chair Mike Selig appeared on CNBC and declared that the derivatives regulator is pressing ahead with crypto market structure rules on its own authority. His phrase was blunt: “It’s go time.”
Selig argued that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s existing statutory mandate gives it sufficient room to act without waiting for Congress. The statement caps what has arguably been the busiest stretch of American crypto policymaking in years, and none of it required a single bill passing either chamber.
The pivot matters because it signals a decisive shift in how federal financial regulators intend to handle digital assets: through administrative action, no-action letters and formal rulemaking rather than legislation. For crypto markets, which have spent years in a state of jurisdictional limbo between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the practical consequences could be substantial, particularly for perpetual futures.
For background on the underlying assets driving this regulatory attention, see our Bitcoin coverage.
The busiest week in US crypto policy in years
The failed Senate vote on the Clarity Act could have marked a legislative dead end. Instead, both SEC Chair Atkins and CFTC Chair Selig said within 24 hours of the vote that their agencies would proceed regardless. What followed was a cascade of administrative moves.
The SEC approved a five-year Innovation Exemption allowing tokenised US stocks to trade on public blockchains without exchange registration, effective immediately. The agency then held a roundtable on 24-hour trading with the NYSE, Nasdaq and DTCC in the room, a signal that the traditional exchange infrastructure is being brought into the conversation rather than frozen out of it.
The CFTC, for its part, issued a no-action letter permitting wallet apps to route users to regulated derivatives venues without registering as brokers. That single letter quietly resolves a question that has hung over self-custody and aggregator products for years.
The SEC also sent a crypto custody proposal to the Office of Management and Budget, the standard precursor to formal rulemaking. And the CFTC filed two prerules with the White House: Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets, both filed under RIN 3038-AF80.
Selig’s framing went beyond crypto itself. He said the agency must reevaluate all of its rules for a transition to 24/7 onchain markets driven by algorithms and agentic finance. That is a striking statement. It amounts to the CFTC saying it expects to regulate markets where software, not people, executes the majority of trading activity.
What the CFTC can and cannot do: perps yes, spot no
The legal boundaries here are important. Under its existing authority, the CFTC can build a designated contract market category that lets exchanges offer leveraged crypto trading under its oversight. What it cannot do is claim jurisdiction over the spot market, which was the entire point of the Clarity Act and still requires legislation.
So perpetual futures it is.
This is a significant headline for the leaders in the perps space and their integration into the US market. Hyperliquid and Lighter emerge as the clear winners. LIT hit an all-time high of $5.40 yesterday, and HYPE traded within 1 to 2 per cent of its own record. The market read is straightforward: it appears these platforms will have the full green light, and it is simply a matter of time before formal pathways open.
Expect a slew of announcements from both platforms as the CFTC pushes its rulemaking forward. Binance has already announced it will list HYPE for spot trading, a further endorsement of the token’s momentum.
There is a nuance worth flagging. Kalshi, the prediction market operator, denied being under CFTC investigation after the Wall Street Journal reported the agency was examining its ether perpetual trading. A spokesperson said the patterns in question are typical of liquidity incentive programmes. The episode is a reminder that administrative enthusiasm for crypto does not mean regulatory scrutiny has disappeared; it means the scrutiny is being channelled through formal processes rather than enforcement-first postures.
Market reaction: red tapestry, green ETF flows
Against this regulatory backdrop, crypto majors fell roughly 3 per cent alongside broader markets. BTC traded at $83.4k, down 3 per cent, after touching a 24-hour high of $84,843. ETH fell 3 per cent to $2,650, SOL slipped 3 per cent to $113, and HYPE dropped 5 per cent to $91. ZEC was the notable laggard among larger names, down 10 per cent at $1,485.
Meme coins took the brunt of the risk-off tone. DOGE lost 7 per cent, SHIB 8 per cent, PEPE 12 per cent, PENGU 11 per cent, TRUMP 11 per cent, SPX 14 per cent and BONK 14 per cent. Robinhood chain leaders fell 10 to 20 per cent, though a handful of outliers bucked the trend: Prism gained 28 per cent, Strategy rose 40 per cent and IMDSTR posted an extraordinary 70x move.
Yet the institutional picture tells a different story. US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $347 million in net inflows on Wednesday, bringing the three-day total to more than $2 billion. ETH ETFs took in $105 million and SOL ETFs $14 million. Retail may be de-risking; allocators are not.
The macro backdrop is doing the market few favours. Stock futures fell as Treasury yields hit fresh multi-year highs, with the Dow futures down 0.3 per cent and Nasdaq futures down 0.9 per cent. Oil rose 2 per cent to $93 while gold slipped 0.7 per cent to $4,290. Crypto is trading increasingly as a risk asset tethered to rates, whatever the regulatory tailwinds.
Options traders are positioned for the upside all the same. Roughly $15.9 billion in Bitcoin options settle Friday alongside ether’s quarterly expiry, with positioning skewed toward calls and max pain sitting at $75,000, well below spot near $85,500 at the time of the expiry calculations.
Stablecoin statecraft and the tokenisation race
Beyond the CFTC, the policy picture keeps widening. The Trump administration is weighing an initiative to push dollar-backed stablecoins overseas, potentially through joint ventures with private firms, in an effort to defend the dollar’s reserve status and boost demand for Treasuries. The plan would extend dollar dominance through crypto rails rather than defending against them.
An Office of Government Ethics filing released Tuesday showed Trump’s accounts bought up to $115,000 of Strategy stock in July across two purchases, plus Coinbase shares, while selling MARA and CleanSpark. The disclosure will do little to quiet questions about the intersection of the administration’s policy agenda and its personal market exposure.
The tokenisation race, meanwhile, is accelerating on every front. NYSE signed a memorandum of understanding with Blockchain.com to distribute tokenised US stocks and ETFs through its planned digital ATS, reaching more than 44 million accounts across 70-plus jurisdictions, pending regulatory approval. MoonPay agreed to buy North Capital for more than $60 million in stock, acquiring SEC broker-dealer, transfer agent, trading and advisory registrations to build tokenised real-world asset infrastructure. Coinbase launched fixed-rate Bitcoin-backed loans, the first enterprise-scale deployment of Morpho Midnight, letting users lock the rate and maturity on USDC borrowed against BTC, alongside a variable-rate book above $1.4 billion.
Onchain, Hyperliquid led protocols with $2.12 million in daily revenue, followed by Pump at $1.83 million and Stonk at $958k, with Stonk posting its sixth straight day above $1 million according to its own metrics. Variational announced tokenomics and TGE details including a 32 per cent “genesis” airdrop to users and a 100 per cent treasury buy-and-burn model. NFT leaders were mostly flat after a recent leg up: Puds even at 34 ETH, BAYC up 1 per cent at 6.89 ETH, Pudgys even at 3.51 ETH.
Analysis: regulation by default
The most important signal in Selig’s declaration is not the substance of any single rule. It is that US crypto regulation is now proceeding by default, through agency initiative, because the legislative route failed. That carries both promise and risk. The promise is speed: the SEC and CFTC can move in weeks what Congress could not deliver in years. The risk is fragility, because administrative rules can be unwound by future administrations in a way statute cannot.
For perpetual futures platforms, the immediate calculus is unambiguously positive. For spot market participants, the wait continues, and the Clarity Act’s failure means the deepest structural question in US crypto law remains unanswered. Watch the two CFTC prerules under RIN 3038-AF80 and the SEC custody proposal at OMB. Those documents will reveal how far the agencies intend to stretch their authority, and whether “go time” produces a genuine market structure or a patchwork built on legal elastic.
