No ‘Easy Street’: CFTC Acting Chair Shares New Crypto Approach Under Trump Admin

In a recent interview at Coinbase’s State of Crypto Summit, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Acting Chair shared the future of the agency’s crypto regulation under the pro-industry administration.

CFTC Won’t Criminalize Crypto

On Thursday, CFTC’s acting chair, Caroline Pham, told Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi that regulations won’t be easy on anybody, including the crypto industry, despite the end of the “regulation by enforcement” approach under the new administration.

Pham explained that “There is no easy street for anybody, and regulators aren’t easy,” adding that the agency’s shift toward a pro-innovation, pro-growth strategy doesn’t mean companies can bend the law and get away with it.

She clarified that the CFTC’s new approach won’t “twist the law to criminalize an asset class or a technology,” like the past administration. Instead, it will focus on catching fraudsters and scammers in the market. “That’s always been our core mission is to prevent fraud, manipulation, and abuse in our markets and to help victims,” Pham affirmed.

In the interview, the regulatory agency’s chair explained her previous comments about “uberizing crypto,” sharing that it means effectively integrating digital assets into daily life so that banning or criminalizing it becomes nearly impossible, like Uber did with the transportation industry.

“When something becomes so big, so accepted, so part of our lives, you can’t really take it away then. The public, the people, voters, they won’t let you,” she affirmed, noting that the ride-sharing app revolutionized the industry, which resulted in a lot of people unsuccessfully trying to fight it.

Pham considers that the “uberization” of the industry must be the goal to prevent crypto from being unfairly criminalized as a concept or a technology.  “The way that you do that is by bringing it to the people, and the people will speak, and voters will speak,” she stated.

Restoring Regulatory Clarity

Speaking about the previous administration, Pham noted that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and CFTC “really went beyond what the law says and what the statute says,” which has been a common criticism of the US watchdogs.

She condemned how the agency reinterpreted existing laws that applied to traditional markets to go after what they perceived as “bad or evil,” like crypto and blockchain technology, without considering the unintended consequences it could have on the global economy and global markets.

When we start to change the rules for (…) the 700 trillion notional global derivatives markets because we’re trying to be creative and flex it to go after what we perceive to be a bad or evil, you know, crypto or blockchain, that is really breaking the fabric of our global markets.

This is why “restoring the well-settled legal precedents, how the CFTC has applied and interpreted the law for decades, to restore that regulatory clarity” has been a priority under her leadership.

Notably, Pham has repeatedly called for regulatory clarity for the crypto industry, proposing to revive the joint advisory committee between the CFTC and the SEC.

Earlier this year, the regulatory agencies were reportedly discussing their options to effectively collaborate on digital assets regulations, after the launch of the SEC’s Crypto Task Force led by Commissioner Hester Peirce.