U.S. regulators moved swiftly after the Senate's failure to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, launching a series of agency-level rulemaking efforts to fill the regulatory gap — though critics say the resulting framework will be far less durable than legislation would have been.
The Clarity Act, one of many congressional attempts to define which government agencies oversee different categories of digital assets, would have granted the Commodity Futures Trading Commission full supervisory authority over crypto commodity spot markets. With bitcoin trading at $81,656.52 and ethereum's ether at $2,643.82, the bulk of crypto trading falls within the commodity space that currently lacks a dedicated hands-on regulator except in cases of market manipulation.
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, appointed by President Donald Trump, began his tenure prioritizing digital assets even before the bill stalled. Within days of the act's death, Atkins advanced a policy initiative establishing a regulatory path for tokenizing securities — the centerpiece of the SEC's crypto agenda. He has repeatedly stressed that agency action alone cannot substitute for statutes, telling audiences that "only Congress can future-proof regulation in this space."
The SEC and CFTC had already launched a joint digital-assets campaign built around an asset "taxonomy," a staff-level project that could easily be overwritten if leadership changes. Atkins has since pressed several formal rulemaking efforts:
The agency released its first major crypto rule last month, proposing Regulation Crypto Assets, a regime for fundraising through crypto offerings that avoids triggering existing securities requirements. It then proposed a technical but significant rule allowing blockchain records to serve as official proof of ownership. Separately, the SEC is nearing a proposed rule on how investment advisers must custody digital assets.
At the CFTC, Chairman Mike Selig — formerly a crypto-focused SEC official — advanced a proposal on crypto transactions and markets for White House review. The CFTC, where Selig is the sole sitting commissioner on a five-member panel, has already moved on rules for prediction markets and recently opened the door to crypto perpetual futures. Staff are drafting a framework to designate crypto asset trading platforms analogous to the CFTC's existing category of designated contract markets.
Capital Alpha policy analyst Ian Katz noted that the all-Republican leadership at both agencies can advance proposals without Democratic votes, since the White House has left two SEC seats vacant. "Some of those proposals may come with an implied message to Democrats: This is what you get when you don't legislate," Katz wrote.
The patchwork faces structural risks. Agency rules lack the permanence of legislation and may prove vulnerable to legal challenges asserting the agencies exceeded their statutory authority. Atkins himself warned in August that legislation remains "indispensable" to creating rules durable enough to survive a future change in administration.
For now, Project Crypto stands on its own — an agency-driven substitute for a law that never was.
