As President Donald Trump’s opening year winds down in his second administration, he finally landed permanent appointments to lead two of the most important U.S. crypto regulators: Mike Selig as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Travis Hill as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The CFTC is poised to become one of the primary regulators of crypto activity in the United States, particularly if Congress completes legislative work to give more specific crypto authority to the derivatives watchdog. The Senate on Thursday approved Selig and Hill among dozens of other nominees by a vote of 53 to 43. Once sworn in, Selig will succeed Acting Chair Caroline Pham, who has spearheaded a series of pro-crypto policy initiatives while awaiting a permanent replacement at the agency.
Pham has long planned to join MoonPay, a US-based crypto infrastructure service provider, as its chief legal officer and chief administrative officer when she leaves the agency, under the name CoinDesk. reported last month.
When Selig, who worked on crypto policy as a Securities and Exchange Commission official, takes office, some of the digital asset-related tasks already underway under the CFTC’s so-called “crypto sprint” include a push to include stablecoins in tokenized collateral and rulemaking to insert blockchain technology into the agency’s regulatory language. The agency also encouraged regulated platforms to begin issuing leveraged spot crypto products, and Bitnomial was the first to step up and pursue such an offering.
One of the complicating factors for Selig as he moves into crypto work is the fact that the five-member CFTC commission has been allowed to shrink to just one member. Pham said she plans to leave as soon as Selig arrives, which would leave him as a solo member of the commission. While this reduces friction over how easy it will be to implement policies, it could leave some uncertainty over legal vulnerability if the successful implementation of its policies is challenged.
And it will also come as Congress continues to work on a major bill to revise the agency’s powers to give it explicit authority over broader cryptocurrency spot trading. Such legislation has already passed the House of Representatives this year, but it is currently being worked on in the Senate, where the Senate Banking Committee could still hold a review hearing on the effort before the end of the month, according to close observers of the negotiations.
At the FDIC, which will regulate stablecoin issuers and have a significant impact on how the crypto industry is banked, Hill was already leading the agency as acting chairman. In this role, he adopted a pro-crypto stance.
“We reversed the policy of the last several years,” he told lawmakers during a Dec. 2 hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, referring to a Biden administration position in which banking regulators told bankers they needed approval from government supervisors before engaging in new crypto activity. “Banks are expected to manage security and soundness risks, but are otherwise not prohibited from serving these sectors.”
Hill also played a leading role in addressing complaints from the crypto industry over so-called “debanking,” in which banks severed relationships with crypto companies and their executives, a situation that industry insiders and many of their Republican legislative allies say was encouraged by regulatory policy.
The absence of permanent leaders at the CFTC and FDIC remain two of the most glaring vacancies in the Trump administration’s crypto oversight. He had already placed people at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in addition to leading the Treasury Department. Trump undermined the Federal Reserve, where his vice chair for oversight, Michelle Bowman, took over in June. However, he is still waiting to replace Chairman Jerome Powell when his term expires next year.
Senate Republicans have taken an unusual approach to mass confirmation of Trump’s federal nominees. In the resolution that approved these two officials, 97 confirmation questions were attached to the same document, avoiding a traditional confirmation process in which the Senate evaluated each nominee individually.
Read more: Trump’s CFTC pick Mike Selig clears hurdles on path to confirmation vote
