US Commodity Futures Trading Commission Acting Chair Caroline Pham has moved again to advance President Donald Trump’s crypto agenda by removing old guidance on “actual delivery” of crypto products that she says could hinder next steps.
“Eliminating outdated and overly complex guidelines that penalize the crypto industry and stifle innovation is exactly what the administration has set out to do this year,” Pham said in a statement on Thursday.
The guidance, established in 2020 during Trump’s first term, sought to define the “actual delivery” of assets during a crypto commodity transaction, a key concept under the Commodity Exchange Act. Law firm Steptoe had sought formal guidance from the CFTC on defining the term as applied to digital assets as early as 2016. But the report from the President’s Task Force on the administration’s digital assets agenda earlier this year recommended that the CFTC should “consider expanding previous guidance on ‘actual delivery’ of virtual assets.”
The CFTC needed to trim the original document “to reevaluate such guidance in light of new developments over the past five years in the means and methods deployed in the spot market for the purchase and sale of virtual currencies,” it said in the withdrawal notice.
Pham has pushed a rapid series of crypto policy moves at the agency in recent weeks, even as Trump’s nominee to permanently replace her, Mike Selig, heads toward a possible confirmation as soon as next week.
Read more: The CFTC just defined what “actual delivery” of cryptocurrencies should look like
