CLARITY Act · SEC · US Congress · CoinDesk
The CFTC — where Selig is the only current member of a five-member commission
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Selig has said his staff is working on being able to affix a "crypto asset market" label on firms akin to the CFTC's current category of designated contract markets (DCMs).
Key facts
- As Capital Alpha policy analyst Ian Katz put it, the SEC and CFTC are now able to "shift into overdrive with aggressive, pro-industry proposals
- The Clarity Act would have cleared that up and also elevated the SEC's sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to new authorities, most importantly full supervisory powers
- The securities watchdog is run by a guy hand-picked by crypto booster President Donald Trump, and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins started his tenure with digital assets rules top of mind
- He and the CFTC chairman, a former crypto-focused official at Atkins' SEC, Mike Selig, had already embarked on a joint digital assets campaign and started with a set of standards for how different
Summary
It didn't take long for the U.S. markets regulators to try to fill in for a failed Clarity Act, though the efforts at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission may not be a perfect substitute. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has said himself, a lot, that his agency needed a law to back up its work, and it didn't get one. OK, the Clarity Act is dead (at least for now). The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act was Congress' umpteenth version of a similar concept that's made the rounds for years: to define the different kinds of cryptocurrencies and related assets, and say exactly which regulators have power over them. For much of the industry's history in the U.S., it battled with agencies such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over what platforms like Coinbase and Kraken were allowed to do and whether issuing crypto was legally the same as launching a security.