Conversation with SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig | Future of Finance 2026

SEC Digital Asset Initiatives

• Chairman Atkins identifies crypto assets as a top priority, marking a strategic shift from the previous decade's "ostrich" approach of relying on enforcement to a proactive regulatory framework.
• The SEC has withdrawn enforcement actions predicated on registration for digital assets where a compliant registration path did not exist under current rules.
• The agency is utilizing exemptive authority and advisory guidance to facilitate new digital products, specifically tokenized securities and tokenized funds.
• The SEC and CFTC are collaborating on a joint taxonomy to clearly distinguish between tokenized securities (SEC jurisdiction) and digital commodities or collectibles (CFTC jurisdiction).
• Chairman Atkins emphasizes that while agencies are moving forward, statutory certainty from Congress is required to ensure legal durability in a post-Loper Bright Supreme Court environment where court deference is reduced.

CFTC Digital Asset and Blockchain Initiatives

• Chairman Selig describes "Project Crypto" as a historic inter-agency effort to modernize rules, prevent reliance on obsolete technologies, and future-proof regulations for blockchain.
• The CFTC plans to announce, within the next month, the approval of true perpetual futures contracts for crypto assets to bring offshore liquidity back to the U.S.
• The agency is developing clear guidance on digital wallets to distinguish between software tools that implicate CFTC regulations and those that do not, reversing the prior administration's aggressive stance on software providers.
• New rules will clarify the regulatory status of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols, moving away from treating all software systems as exchanges and establishing a path for on-chain markets that meet regulatory standards.
• The CFTC is seeking to implement an innovation exemption similar to the SEC's model to allow firms to test new products without the fear of "regulation by enforcement."

Inter-Agency Harmonization and Cooperation

• Both chairs characterize past regulatory efforts as "two fortresses" with a "no man's land" where innovative products were damaged by inter-agency turf battles and duplicative regulation.
• The SEC and CFTC are establishing a "truce" to share information, coordinate surveillance efforts, and eliminate cases where both agencies sue the same market participant for the same conduct.
• A primary goal is the implementation of a "substituted compliance" regime, allowing market participants to register with a single primary regulator while meeting the requirements of both agencies.
• Chairman Atkins proposes a "mutual recognition" framework where the agencies recognize each other's determinations and registrations, effectively creating a "super app" for market access.
• The agencies aim to clear up historical ambiguities regarding jurisdiction over specific products, such as narrow-based vs. broad-based index futures and security-based swaps vs. swaps.

Capital Formation and IPO Modernization

• Chairman Atkins identifies the dramatic decline in IPOs and the doubling of the private market as a critical failure of the current regulatory environment, noting the U.S. share of global capitalization is now half.
• The SEC is launching three initiatives to revitalize capital formation: a "spring clean" of the rulebook to reduce disclosure volume to material information, reducing litigation risks, and curbing the use of shareholder proposals for social issues rather than economic ones.
• As a specific example of excessive disclosure, Atkins cites an Arkansas/Louisiana utility's 10-K filing, which exceeded 970 pages and obscured material risks.
• The SEC intends to refocus on the core mission of capital markets: enabling companies to raise funds for R&D and development, reversing the trend where staying private is more attractive than going public.

CFTC Jurisdiction over Prediction Markets

• Chairman Selig asserts that event contracts and prediction markets fall exclusively under the CFTC's federal derivatives authority, filing an amicus brief in federal litigation to challenge state-level attempts to regulate them.
• The CFTC views these markets as a "federal pharmaceutical regime" with stringent requirements, contrasting them with the looser, state-level regulations for sports betting and casino gambling.
• Selig argues that prediction markets are vital tools for combating disinformation and that blocking them domestically will only drive the industry offshore to jurisdictions like China or Russia.
• The CFTC plans to issue immediate guidance on self-certification standards for these products and is preparing an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for comprehensive rulemaking.

Technological Shifts in Settlement

• Chairman Atkins highlights the transition from a T+5 settlement cycle (historically common in the 1980s) to T+0 (immediate settlement) via on-chain technology.
• The agency is moving toward immediate on-chain clearance and settlement using stablecoins and tokenized securities, such as money market mutual funds and tokenized bank deposits.
• This shift is expected to de-risk financial services, lower costs, and provide certainty by eliminating the window of time where transactions can fail between execution and settlement.