Agencies announce areas for working in lockstep and priorities for upcoming roundtable
On September 5, 2025, the SEC and CFTC issued a joint statement on regulatory harmonization opportunities and announced a joint SEC/CFTC roundtable to be held at the end of September. This release came on the heels of an announcement released earlier the same week regarding the trading of certain spot crypto asset products, which clarified the staff's views that SEC- and CFTC-registered exchanges are not prohibited from facilitating the trading of certain spot commodity products.
The coordinated effort from the SEC and CFTC appears to have taken to heart the recommendations from the White House digital asset report to immediately find ways to utilize their existing interpretative authority to provide regulatory clarity. The joint statements issued last week by both agencies call for coordination between the SEC and CFTC "to ensure there is not a regulatory 'no man's land' due to inaction by one or both agencies," and notes that the failure to coordinate and lack of regulatory uncertainty has "chilled productive economic activity even when the products would otherwise be allowable under federal law."
The September 5 joint statement indicates that the SEC and the CFTC will be considering harmonizing product and venue definitions, streamlining reporting and data standards, aligning capital and margin frameworks, and standing up coordinated innovation exemptions using each agency's current exemptive authority. Expanding upon the agencies' joint statement, the CFTC's statement set forth the following priorities as potential areas of coordination to be discussed at the upcoming joint roundtable:
- 24/7 Markets: potential for expanding trading hours considering operational feasibility and liquidity that are consistent with protecting investors and consumers;
- Event Contracts: considering collaboration opportunities for event contracts to be made available to U.S. market participants regardless of jurisdictional boundaries;
- Perpetual Contracts: exploring possibly allowing perpetual contracts to trade across SEC- and CFTC- regulated platforms;
- Portfolio Margining: examining whether margin requirements could be harmonized to allow broker-dealers, futures commission merchants, and clearing members to reduce net capital exposures; and
- Innovation Exemptions and Decentralized Finance: evaluation possible innovation exemptions for innovation safe harbors to allow peer-to-peer transactions in spot, leveraged, margined, or other transactions in spot crypto over DeFi protocols.
Both agencies have been extremely active in seeking public feedback and comment in connection with the SEC's Project Crypto and the CFTC Crypto Sprint initiative; however, the joint statements issued last week by both agencies reflect a demonstrated effort to promote and ensure regulatory harmonization and coordination across these two agencies with respect to digital assets. This is no small feat considering the differing approaches to regulation by the two agencies, with the SEC employing a rules-based approach and the CFTC using a principles-based approach, as well as the differing jurisdictional mandates of each agency. However, joint rulemaking by the agencies is certainly not without precedent, and with the concerted effort to provide regulatory clarity on digital assets under this Administration, regulatory reform may finally be well on its way.
We should not take our eyes off the big picture. Regulatory clarity is good for the crypto markets, and the White House, Congress, and the regulators all appear to be of one mind in providing it, and providing it based on "turf-less" collaboration, a substantial public record, and at speed. This is the exact opposite of the "agency-on-agency violence" and "process to the max" tedium to which we have become so accustomed. Congress also is pushing these agencies to work together more closely, as evidenced by Section 401 of the most recent crypto market structure discussion draft issued by the Senate Banking Committee calling for a joint "CFTC-SEC Micro-Innovation Sandbox." Whether this approach produces solid rulemaking is as yet unknown, but one must pause and admire the overall effort and the unflagging intensity.
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