The Senate Needed 60 Votes to Give Crypto a Rulebook and Got 49. The CFTC Needed Zero, and Just Filed One With the White House.

On Tuesday the Senate killed the CLARITY Act, the bill that was supposed to decide who regulates crypto in America. It needed 60 votes. It got 49.

On Thursday the Commodity Futures Trading Commission answered by filing its own crypto rulebook with the White House. Number of votes required: zero.

The filing is listed on Reginfo.gov as RIN 3038-AF80, titled Regulation of Crypto Asset Transactions and Crypto Asset Markets. Nobody outside government has read it. But CFTC Chair Mike Selig laid out exactly what he wanted a month ago, and the day after the Senate vote he posted this on X: “The CFTC is locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance.”

What Actually Got Filed

Every major federal rule has to pass through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a unit of the White House Office of Management and Budget, before the public sees it. That’s where the CFTC sent its crypto package on Thursday, September 17, two days after the CLARITY cloture motion failed 49-50.

The details that are public, per Reginfo and reporting from The Block, CoinDesk and Decrypt:

• Two regulations, one filing. “Crypto Asset Transactions” covers trading, custody and settlement. “Crypto Asset Markets” covers how trading venues are structured and registered.
• Pre-rule stage. This is an advance notice, not a proposed rule and not a final one. It’s the first of several steps.
• Marked “not economically significant.” That means the agency is claiming the rule won’t have an annual economic impact of $100 million or more, a designation that typically gets a faster OIRA review.
• Text is confidential until OIRA clears it. The CFTC declined to comment on specifics.

The CFTC didn’t stop there. The same day, its Market Participants Division issued Staff Letter 26-25, which tells any “passive” software provider, crypto wallets included, that staff won’t recommend enforcement for failing to register as an introducing broker when the software just lets users see markets and route orders to a registered futures firm. That generalizes a no-action letter Phantom, the self-custodial wallet, got in March. The conditions: you can market specific contracts and earn transaction-based fees, but you can’t hold customer assets, generate buy or sell signals, or control how orders get routed or executed. Risk disclosures, recordkeeping and marketing rules still apply.

And on the same Thursday, the SEC dropped its five-year “innovation exemption” for tokenized stock trading, which we covered here. Congress went home. The agencies did not.

What Selig Already Told Us Is In It

The filing is sealed, but Selig telegraphed the contents on August 20 at the first meeting of the CFTC’s new Innovation Advisory Committee. His words then:

“If CLARITY continues to stall because of Democrat obstruction, the CFTC will utilize its existing authorities to begin establishing a regime for crypto asset markets.”

The mechanism he described is the interesting part. Under the Commodity Exchange Act, as amended by Dodd-Frank, any commodity sold to retail on a leveraged, margined or financed basis has to trade on a CFTC-designated contract market (DCM), the same category as CME. The CFTC has never had to be told it has jurisdiction over that. It’s been sitting on it.

Selig’s plan is to create a new flavor of DCM called a “crypto asset market.” Existing registrants and currently unregistered crypto exchanges could apply to be designated as one, then legally “offer crypto asset trading on a leveraged or margined basis subject to purpose-fit rules.” Purpose-fit is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A standard DCM has to satisfy 23 core principles under Section 5(d) of the Act, written for futures pits, not for a 24/7 spot venue settling onchain. The “purpose-fit” language is Selig’s signal that crypto venues would get a tailored version.

He also said he’d told staff to “engage with developers of onchain finance protocols to establish ways in which developers can offer their protocols in a legal and compliant manner.” Read alongside the passive-software letter, that’s the DeFi lane: front-ends and wallets that route to regulated venues get relief, and the protocols themselves get a conversation.

Selig framed all of this as second-best. His line in August was that passing CLARITY was “the surest way that we can prevent another Gary Gensler from running a rogue campaign.” He gave the bill “its breathing room for a vote.” The vote failed. So here we are.

The Timeline Nobody Wants to Hear

“Ready to ship” is a tweet, not a calendar. Here’s the actual process, per the OIRA rules and the analysis published by 24/7 Wall St. and others:

Step	Earliest realistic date
OIRA review (up to 90 days, plus one 30-day extension)	Clears November or December 2026 if it moves in ~60 days
Advance notice published, first comment period	Late 2026
Proposed rule, second OIRA review, second comment period	2027
Final binding rule	Late 2027 at the earliest

That’s the optimistic path. It assumes OIRA moves fast, the five-seat commission votes twice without drama, and nobody files a lawsuit.

The durability problem is the bigger one. JPMorgan’s analysts put it plainly this week: agency rules are less durable than legislation. A future commission can rewrite them, and a court can throw them out under the Administrative Procedure Act. CLARITY would have put the CFTC’s spot-crypto authority in statute. A DCM rule puts it in the Federal Register, which is a very different kind of permanent.

Bernstein and JPMorgan both still expect the agencies to be “aggressive and swift.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called Tuesday’s failure “go time” for the regulators. Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse urged them to act. SEC Chair Paul Atkins: “with or without legislation, we will act decisively within the SEC’s statutory authority.” Senator Cynthia Lummis, who spent a year writing CLARITY, called the bill “all but dead this year.”

Markets didn’t mind. Bitcoin broke back above $80,000 on Friday, up about 5% on the day, after spot ETFs took in roughly $160 million on Thursday following two days of outflows. The industry seems to have decided that two agencies moving is better than one Congress not.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

Strip away the Washington drama and this filing describes a product: US-regulated leveraged spot crypto, offered by exchanges that today either geofence American users or run offshore. If the rule lands in anything like the form Selig described, it creates a registration category that every serious US venue will want. Registration categories create headcount.

• DCM compliance and market surveillance. Becoming a designated contract market means core-principle compliance, trade surveillance, a chief compliance officer with real statutory duties, and regular CFTC exams. Kraken, Coinbase, Gemini, Bitnomial and anyone else who wants US leveraged spot will need people who have actually run a DCM or FCM compliance program. Those people mostly work at CME, Cboe, ICE and a handful of law firms right now. Expect poaching.
• Derivatives and margin product roles. Leveraged spot with a US rulebook means risk engines, margin models, liquidation logic and clearing relationships built to a regulator’s spec, not a Telegram group’s. Quant risk, product managers with derivatives backgrounds, and treasury/collateral people will be in demand.
• Wallet and front-end developers just got a lane. Staff Letter 26-25 means a wallet team can build order routing into a registered derivatives venue without an introducing-broker license, as long as the software stays passive and doesn’t touch custody. Phantom did it first. The next twelve months will have a lot of “derivatives tab” projects, and they’ll need engineers who understand FIX, order lifecycle and the disclosure conditions in the letter.
• Policy and regulatory-affairs hiring shifts from Capitol Hill to the agencies. Two comment periods, two OIRA reviews and a likely legal challenge mean every exchange, DeFi foundation and trade group needs people who can write a comment letter that a commissioner will actually read. Lobbyists who sold access to senators are less valuable this month. Ex-CFTC staff and administrative-law lawyers are more valuable.
• The caveat for anyone planning a career on this. Final rule: late 2027, best case. Legal challenge: probable. Reversal by a future commission: possible. Take a role because the venue is building something real, not because a pre-rule notice got filed on Reginfo.

Congress took a year to not pass a bill. The CFTC took two days to file one. Whichever way the rule goes, the firms hiring to meet it are hiring now.

Looking for your next role in crypto? Browse compliance, derivatives, protocol engineering and policy jobs at the exchanges and protocols building for the US market at cryptogrind.com.