The Commodity Futures Trading Commission submitted a rulemaking package titled Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on 17 September, two days after the Senate’s cloture vote on the CLARITY Act failed 49 to 50. The filing, catalogued as RIN 3038-AF80, sits at the prerule stage, meaning the actual regulatory text is not yet public.
That stage matters procedurally. Under the executive order governing agency rulemaking, OIRA has ten working days to review a prerule filing, against ninety days once a rule reaches proposed or final form. The package would reportedly create a new designated contract market category letting currently unregistered crypto exchanges offer leveraged trading under CFTC oversight, the kind of market structure change the CLARITY Act was meant to legislate before it stalled.
Michael Selig, the CFTC’s only sitting commissioner after a wave of departures left the agency without a quorum for formal votes, is steering the effort. Moving through rulemaking rather than waiting on Congress lets the agency act without new statutory authority, but it is also a narrower and more legally contestable route than a law would have been, and one a future commission could unwind far more easily than Congress could repeal a statute.
If OIRA’s review closes within its ten-day window, a proposed rule could be public by November or December, but the agency’s own timeline does not put a final, binding rule into effect until sometime in 2027. Nothing about the substance of the rule is settled yet, and nothing says a single-commissioner agency’s rulemaking survives the two comment periods still ahead of it unchanged.
