WASHINGTON, DC — Perpetual cryptocurrency futures have largely expanded overseas due to U.S. reluctance to pursue regulation of the sector, said Mike Selig, chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and his agency will soon provide guidance on how the activity should be managed.
These derivative contracts, which do not expire and are often associated with leverage, attract great interest in the sector. The US exchange Kraken, for example, recently announced its move to perpetual futures contracts for stocks tokenized for non-US users.
Selig’s agency is “working to get a professional future, a real professional future here in the United States within about a month,” he said Tuesday at a Milken Institute event in Washington. “We plan to announce it very soon.”
“The previous administration pushed a lot of these companies and their liquidity overseas,” he noted.
That was the theme of his remarks and those of his counterpart at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Chairman Paul Atkins. As they have often done lately to highlight their shared mission on digital assets, which they call Project Crypto, the two appeared on stage together and highlighted their unified approach.
One of the things the two are pursuing are “innovation exceptions” to allow crypto experimentation without fear of regulatory crackdown. Selig said they would also soon define how decentralized finance (DeFi) developers would be approached after years of lawsuits and regulatory uncertainty.
Selig, who can act alone as he is currently the only member of the five-member CFTC commission, also said that prediction markets – a cousin of the crypto industry – will receive “guidance in the very near future” from the regulator. “We are going to set very clear standards.” And he said the agency is also working on a more comprehensive rulemaking process to soon give that position a more permanent basis than guidelines, which are procedurally easy to scrap and rewrite.
Oversight of events contracting companies, including leaders such as Polymarket and Kalshi, is contested, with gambling regulators putting pressure on their own authorities over the company’s sports contracts. Selig stepped forward to fight this in court, asserting the CFTC’s position as the primary regulator of these companies’ activities.
“They can exist in parallel,” he said Tuesday of the two regulatory regimes.
Atkins, however, addressed one of the drawbacks of regulators’ current work: the legal position. Despite Atkins’ previous confidence that the SEC can move forward without new laws governing its crypto work, he said Tuesday, “We really need statutory certainty.”
“We need the sense of Congress,” he said.
Two years ago, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling removed a significant degree of authority that federal regulators had in legal disputes over their actions, so agencies going it alone on policy direction no longer have the clout they once did. Agencies such as the SEC and CFTC can more easily be challenged, and their positions can also be easily overturned by future officials arriving at the commissions.
The US Senate is still working on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which aims to establish a regulatory system for US crypto markets. That legislative effort remains stuck in negotiations involving industry, bankers, lawmakers from both parties and the White House. Its chances of passage in 2026 become more difficult every day as the midterm elections approach and the time available in the Senate dwindles.
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