CFTC proposes leveraged crypto rules, spot market still uncovered — SkimNews
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- CFTC proposed Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM to govern crypto trading involving leverage, margin, or financing, establishing a new "crypto asset markets" (CAM) category that's narrower than existing designated contract markets (DCMs).
- A major spot-market gap remains because the CFTC lacks authority over direct crypto trading — the same issue at the center of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act that stalled in the U.S. Senate last month.
- CFTC Chairman Mike Selig has been the agency's sole commissioner for nearly a year, allowing him to take unilateral actions; the SEC is similarly understaffed with only Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioner Mark Uyeda.
- The SEC moved ahead of the CFTC with late-last-week custody rules and a tokenization exemption, and both agencies jointly issued a token taxonomy earlier this year to divide their jurisdictional authority.
- The new rules are anchored in the Commodity Exchange Act's retail-trading provisions from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, requiring futures commission merchants as intermediaries with Bank Secrecy Act safeguards and proof-of-reserves for exchanges holding customer assets in omnibus accounts.
- Selig announced the agency is also exploring protections for software developers, arguing "A person should not have to register as an introducing broker simply because that person shipped code."
Why it matters: With the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act dead in the Senate, the CFTC and SEC are now writing crypto rules by agency action — but the spot market where most Bitcoin and altcoin trading actually happens stays under state money-transmission laws. The 60-day comment period will determine how much crypto activity migrates to federally regulated CAM platforms versus remaining in the unregulated spot gap.
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