CFTC has crypto rules ready if CLARITY Act stalls

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has prepared digital asset market structure proposals that could move forward even if Congress does not pass the CLARITY Act.

Whale Insider reported on Aug. 20 that Acting Chairman Caroline Pham said the CFTC already had regulatory proposals prepared, giving the agency a route to continue its crypto agenda if lawmakers fail to complete the legislation.

“Crypto will get market structure regardless of bill,” Pham said, according to the report.

Pham’s statement did not identify which proposals the agency has finished drafting, when it could publish them, or how much of the planned framework could be created under the CFTC’s current legal powers. Congress would still need to act before the regulator could receive the full spot-market authority contemplated by the CLARITY Act.

The CFTC currently oversees derivatives markets, including futures, options, and swaps tied to digital assets. Its enforcement authority also covers fraud and manipulation in spot commodity transactions. The agency does not have the same routine supervisory power over crypto spot exchanges that it exercises over registered derivatives platforms.

Without legislation, any CFTC proposals would have to remain within the authority already provided by the Commodity Exchange Act. Rules covering registered derivatives venues, intermediaries, disclosure requirements, or crypto futures could therefore move independently. A complete federal framework for spot digital commodity trading would require action from Congress.

For U.S. investors, the distinction affects which regulator supervises the platforms where they trade. The CLARITY Act would create a registration framework for certain digital commodity exchanges and divide responsibility for digital assets between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The bill would generally place qualifying digital commodities under CFTC oversight while preserving the SEC's authority over crypto assets treated as securities. Lawmakers have continued negotiating the treatment of decentralized finance, ethics restrictions, and rewards offered on stablecoin balances.

An expansion of the CFTC's duties would also raise questions about staffing and resources. The commission is designed to have five members. It currently has one confirmed commissioner, Pham, while its workforce has fallen from its fiscal 2025 level.

Staffing constraints would become more important if the agency had to supervise spot crypto trading alongside its existing work in derivatives, prediction markets, and enforcement. The CLARITY Act could assign the CFTC primary oversight of a large part of the U.S. digital asset market, requiring the regulator to review registrations and monitor companies that are not presently under its routine supervision.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the CLARITY Act before lawmakers left Washington for their August recess. Under the Senate schedule, the procedural vote is set to ripen on Sept. 15 after senators return.

Cloture requires 60 votes. Republican support alone may not be enough to move the bill forward. Even if the Senate invokes cloture, the vote would only allow the chamber to begin considering the measure. Senators could still debate or amend the text before voting on final passage.

The House approved its version of the CLARITY Act in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee advanced its text in May 2026. Any Senate version that differs from the House bill would require additional congressional action before the legislation could reach the president.

Negotiations have remained difficult as lawmakers debate ethics requirements for public officials and restrictions involving stablecoin rewards. The bill's chances of passage have also weakened in prediction markets. Polymarket priced its probability of becoming law in 2026 below 20% by mid-August after showing odds of 82% in February.

President Donald Trump urged lawmakers during an Aug. 19 White House event to pass what he called a “fair version” of the legislation. Trump described the proposal as bipartisan and said federal law was needed to preserve the administration's digital asset policies beyond his presidency.

Representatives from Coinbase, Gemini, Ripple, Kraken, Chainlink Labs, Anchorage Digital, Grayscale and OKX attended the event, along with executives from prediction-market and artificial intelligence companies. The White House meeting took place one day before the CFTC's first Innovation Advisory Committee session.

The CFTC scheduled the inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee meeting for Aug. 20 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. EDT in Washington. Its agenda covers digital assets, artificial intelligence in financial markets, and prediction markets.

During the crypto session, committee members are expected to examine customer protection, market integrity and the CFTC's ability to use its present statutory authority. The discussion also covers how agency action could complement legislation passed by Congress rather than replace the additional powers contained in the CLARITY Act.

Committee members include executives and specialists from crypto companies, traditional financial institutions, market infrastructure providers, and technology businesses. The advisory body can make recommendations. It cannot adopt binding regulations or expand the CFTC's legal jurisdiction.

Members of the public can submit written statements related to the meeting through Aug. 27. The commission will publish accepted materials as part of the committee record. The meeting itself does not include a vote on a crypto market structure proposal.

At the same time, the SEC has been developing separate rules for crypto offerings and tokenized securities. Securitize President Brett Redfearn said the securities regulator pulled back a planned innovation exemption because of concerns surrounding the Sept. 15 CLARITY Act vote.

Redfearn expects the innovation exemption to return after the Senate vote, possibly in early October. The proposal would provide a tailored regulatory route for companies seeking to issue and trade tokenized securities while keeping the products within the SEC's jurisdiction.

The SEC also canceled an Aug. 14 open meeting at which commissioners had been scheduled to consider a separate offering framework for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. The agency cited an unforeseen scheduling issue and did not publicly connect the cancellation to the CLARITY Act.

Outside digital assets, the CFTC requested public comments on Aug. 19 about derivatives linked to artificial intelligence computing capacity. The 19-page consultation covers liquidity, reference prices, manipulation risks, customer safeguards, and the possible listing of perpetual compute futures.

“America cannot win the AI race without a robust derivatives market for compute,” Pham said in the agency's announcement. She described the consultation as the first step toward setting rules for U.S. compute markets.

A compute contract could track the cost of renting a particular graphics processor, such as Nvidia's H100 or Blackwell B200, or reference access to a specified amount of AI inference capacity. The request does not approve any contract, create a final rule, or authorize an exchange to start trading the products.

Public comments will remain open for 60 days after the consultation appears in the Federal Register. As of Aug. 20, the document had not been published in the register, leaving the final submission deadline unset.

CME Group has targeted Oct. 5 for two futures contracts based on daily GPU rental benchmarks supplied by Silicon Data. Both planned products remain subject to regulatory review. The proposed launch date does not guarantee that the CFTC's review will be completed by then.