The SEC and CFTC join hands: State of Crypto

Though we’re still waiting on a lot of the formal rulemaking and proposed rulemaking from the federal securities and commodities regulators, last week’s memo is another sign that the SEC and CFTC are at least serious about signalling these efforts are coming.

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The narrative

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission formally agreed to work more closely together to explain how they’d oversee crypto and other issues.

Why it matters

The agencies continue to signal that their past regulatory turf war has ended, and laid out a an explanation of how they’ll jointly approach rulemaking — a welcome sign for the crypto industry.

Breaking it down

The SEC and CFTC signed a memorandum of understanding last week aimed at combining their regulatory approaches to the digital asset and other emerging technology sectors. According to the memo, the agencies will regularly hold joint meetings, share data and otherwise communicate their efforts to oversee the digital asset sector.

“More than aligning our rules, a harmonized framework also demands coordinating our responses to the firms that operate within it, including those that have questions of interpretation or request exemptive relief,” SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in prepared remarks earlier this week.

The chief suggestion here: That the SEC and CFTC will coordinate how they’re both defining a digital asset as a security or a not-security, in a way they didn’t two years ago.

One of the goals of the memo is for the agencies to “clarify product definitions through joint interpretations and rulemakings,” it said.

The memo also said the agencies would update their regulatory frameworks for regulated companies across a number of areas, including clearing and margin, trade data and intermediaries, among others.

This harmonization effort may extend beyond just crypto — the regulators are considering moving into one office building (the SEC’s), Bloomberg reported.

While the SEC and CFTC are making efforts to merge their approaches to the sector, the agencies and broader industry participants are still waiting to see what happens with the market structure bill currently working its way through the Senate. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Punchbowl News that he did not expect the bill to work through the Senate before the “April time period” earlier this week.

Congress is just a week out from its two-week Easter break, meaning even if the Senate Banking Committee’s members come to an agreement to move the bill forward, sheer logistics mean the Senate is unlikely to have time to get to the bill in the immediate future. While I’m not sure how much this will affect the Senate’s work on market structure, it’s also worth noting that lawmakers are still negotiating a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and President Donald Trump has said he wants Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) before he would sign any other bill. Neither of these efforts seem likely to pass immediately however, reporting suggests.

This week

• There are no hearings scheduled as of press time. My colleague Jesse Hamilton and I will be at the Digital Chamber’s conference in Washington. Come say hi!

If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at [email protected] or find me on Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.

You can also join the group conversation on Telegram.

See ya’ll next week!