Trump's SEC and CFTC move to write crypto rules as CLARITY Act stalls

Two of the United States’ financial regulators, headed by Trump-appointed chiefs, are planning to write cryptocurrency rules on their own while the CLARITY Act remains stuck in the Senate. 

Lawmakers have only about 14 working days after they return from recess to pass the CLARITY Act before the October election break.  

What are the proposed placeholders for the CLARITY Act? 

The CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s top legislative priority, has been put off for another month after the Senate left for a five-week recess without voting on it. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed a cloture motion setting a procedural vote for September 15 that would need 60 votes, and a failure there could effectively end the bill. Lawmakers have only 14 working days after they return before an October election recess.

Opposition to the bill comes from Democrats who want tougher anti-money-laundering safeguards and tighter ethics rules, while CME Group sued the CFTC in June over its approval of perpetual crypto futures. 

Republicans updated the bill in July to bar the president and other federal officials from issuing or sponsoring crypto, with penalties reaching $250,000 a day, but the two parties still disagree over whether the Justice Department or state attorneys general should enforce that ban.

How the Trump admin is advancing crypto regulation

As a workaround to this delay, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected within weeks to propose a rule that would exempt some token offerings from securities requirements. 

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), meanwhile, is set to put crypto on the agenda at an industry event later this week.

Meanwhile, the White House is reportedly expected to host executives from crypto, prediction markets, and traditional finance on Wednesday. 

Nate Geraci, president of Nova Dius Wealth, wrote on X that expected attendees include SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, Acting CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, and executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Polymarket, and Gemini, alongside Wall Street names such as Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, CME Group, and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). 

The meeting happens one day before the CFTC holds its first Innovation Advisory Committee, a panel drawn from crypto, gambling, finance, and prediction market firms.

Why does the industry still want a law?

Executives are open to the cryptocurrency rules from the SEC or CFTC, but rules written by regulators can be challenged in court, and a future administration could scrap them. The Trump administration already reversed dozens of Biden-era SEC and consumer-protection policies. Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler also sued dozens of crypto firms under President Biden. 

On August 14, the SEC canceled a meeting where it was set to vote on proposing its first formal crypto-specific rulemaking, known as “Regulation Crypto.” 

The proposal would have created three ways for companies to offer tokens, including one that would have let startups raise about $5 million without full SEC registration and another path that would have allowed fundraising of up to $75 million. 

The SEC canceled the meeting where it was going to vote on this proposal because officials worried that the SEC moving forward on its own could hurt the chances of the CLARITY Act passing in Congress.

However, with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the agency’s Crypto Task Force, set to leave the agency in November 2026, there is more pressure on the SEC to finish its work before she goes.

The SEC also delayed another plan called the “innovation exemption” that would have let crypto firms issue and trade digital versions of stocks and bonds without going through the full SEC registration process. 

But traditional finance groups like the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association pushed back on the system, arguing that big changes like this should go through proper rulemaking procedures, not exemptions that skip the normal process.

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