SEC, CFTC Move Unilaterally on Crypto Rules Days After Clarity Act's Senate Defeat

Two days after the Clarity Act failed its Senate cloture vote, the SEC and CFTC each issued crypto-market relief within hours of one another on Thursday, following through on promises both chairs made a day earlier to write crypto rules using their existing authority rather than wait for Congress.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins said Wednesday that "with or without legislation, we will act decisively within the SEC's statutory authority to deliver certainty for American investors, while CFTC Chair Mike Selig said his agency was "locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance."

The SEC's order, issued Thursday, grants a five-year exemption letting Tokenized Securities Venues trade tokenized versions of NMS-listed stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools without registering as traditional exchanges. The relief carries conditions: tokenized shares must carry identical rights to their traditional counterparts, trading must halt whenever the primary listing exchange halts, smart contracts must be public, auditable and deployed on permissionless ledgers, and venues must publicly disclose their operations and trading activity. Atkins called the move a step to bring US markets onchain "within its statutory authority," and the SEC is taking public comment on the exemption as it weighs permanent rulemaking.