CFTC goes it alone on crypto rules after Clarity Act collapse

The CFTC published an advance notice on Regulations CTX and CAM, proposing federal oversight for crypto exchanges offering leverage after the Clarity Act failed in the Senate.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking outlining two frameworks, Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM, that would bring crypto exchanges offering leverage under federal oversight, the agency announced on 5 October 2026.

The move completes a shift from Capitol Hill to regulators. Congress’s Clarity Act, which would have set ground rules for most U.S. crypto activity, failed in the Senate in September. The CFTC had sent the framework to the White House for review days after that failure, and Chairman Michael Selig said in August that the agency would write its own crypto rules if Congress came up short.

A repudiation of the old playbook

The notice also rejects the agency’s own past approach. It describes the CFTC’s earlier cases against Kraken, Ooki DAO and Uniswap as “regulation by enforcement” and frames the proposed rules as forward-looking instead. Selig said the frameworks are “designed to prevent, rather than only prosecute after the fact, fraudulent schemes such as FTX.”

What the plan would do

The framework rests on a 2010 Dodd-Frank provision requiring retail commodity trades offered with leverage, margin or financing to run through a CFTC-registered exchange, as if they were futures. Regulation CTX defines which crypto trades fall into that net, and Regulation CAM would create a “crypto asset market” license, a tailored version of the designated contract market status held by futures exchanges.

The agency is also weighing proof-of-reserves requirements and standards against listing tokens prone to manipulation. Exchanges that do not offer leverage could keep operating under state money transmitter licenses.

An advance notice is an early step that seeks public input before formal rules are drafted, and none have been. The public will have 60 days to comment once the notice appears in the Federal Register, a clock that has not yet started.