WASHINGTON, DC – Crypto perpetual futures have largely developed overseas because of the United States’ reluctance to enforce industry regulations, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Mike Selig said, and his agency will soon provide guidance on how that business should be handled.
These derivative contracts, which do not expire and are often associated with leverage, have been an area of great interest for the industry. US exchange Kraken, for example, recently announced a move towards perpetual futures for tokenized stocks for non-US users.
Selig’s agency is “working to get future professionals, real future professionals here in the United States within the next month,” he said at a Milken Institute event in Washington on Tuesday. “We hope to announce it very soon.”
“The previous administration expelled many of these companies and liquidity abroad,” he said.
That was the theme of his comments and those of his counterpart at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Chairman Paul Atkins. As they have often done lately to underscore their shared mission on digital assets, which they call Project Crypto, the two appeared on stage together and highlighted their unified approach.
One of the things they are both pursuing is “innovation exceptions” to allow cryptocurrency experimentation without fear of regulatory repression. Selig said they will also soon define how decentralized finance (DeFi) developers will be approached after years of prosecution and regulatory uncertainty.
Selig, who can act on his own because he is currently the only member of the CFTC’s five-member commission, also said that prediction markets – an overlapping cousin of the crypto sector – will receive “guidance in the very near future” from the regulator. “We’re going to set very clear standards.” And he said the agency is also working on a more comprehensive rulemaking process to soon give that position a more permanent basis than guidance, which is procedurally easy to delete and rewrite.
Oversight of event contracting companies, including leaders such as Polymarket and Kalshi, is in dispute, with state gaming regulators putting pressure on their own authorities over the company’s sports contracts. Selig stepped forward to combat that in court, arguing the CFTC’s position as the primary regulator of the activities of such companies.
“They can exist in parallel,” he said Tuesday of the two regulatory regimes.
Atkins, however, delved into one of the drawbacks of regulators’ current work: legal capacity. Despite Atkins’ previous confidence that the SEC can move forward without new laws directing its crypto work, he said Tuesday, “We really need legal certainty.”
“We need sense from Congress,” he said.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision two years ago eliminated a significant degree of authority that federal regulators enjoyed in judicial disputes over their actions, so agencies acting alone on policy guidance no longer carry the weight they once did. Agencies like the SEC and CFTC can be more easily challenged, and their positions can also be easily reversed by future officials who come to the committees.
The US Senate is still working on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which aims to establish a regulatory system for US crypto markets. That legislative effort remains stalled in negotiations involving the industry, bankers, lawmakers from both parties and the White House. Its chances of passage in 2026 become more difficult by the day, as the midterm elections approach and the time available in the Senate dwindles.
Read more: SEC chief headlines event sponsored by crypto company at war with her.
