On September 18 — three days after the Senate failed to clear cloture on the CLARITY Act — the CFTC submitted a new crypto market-structure proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review. It's a procedural step, not a finished rule, but it's a meaningful one: it confirms the CFTC isn't waiting on Congress and is moving through the rulemaking machinery it already has.
What "sent to OMB" actually means
Federal agencies don't just publish a new rule the moment they write one. A "significant" regulatory action typically goes through interagency review — commonly through OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — before the agency can formally propose it. After that review, the CFTC's own reporting indicates the proposal returns to the agency for a commissioner vote, then a public comment period, then another vote before it can take effect. In plain terms: this is an early step in a multi-stage process, not a rule taking effect next week.
What's actually in the proposal — and what isn't public yet
The specifics haven't been disclosed. It's not yet public which crypto assets the proposal would cover, what registration or disclosure requirements exchanges would face, or how far the CFTC is reaching under its existing authority over commodity derivatives. That's worth naming plainly rather than guessing at: the headline here is that the CFTC moved, not yet what it decided.
“The CFTC is locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance,” CFTC Chair Mike Selig said following the submission.
A second, smaller move the same week
Separately, the CFTC issued no-action relief allowing certain passive software providers — including crypto wallet interfaces — to connect users to regulated derivatives markets without registering as introducing brokers. It's a narrower move than the market-structure proposal, but it points the same direction: the agency easing its own registration requirements where it can, rather than waiting for new statutory categories from Congress.
How this connects to the SEC's own moves
This lands the same week the SEC granted its own exemptive-relief framework letting tokenized stocks trade on public blockchains. Both agencies said back in mid-September, right after the CLARITY Act's cloture vote failed, that they'd advance crypto rules independently rather than wait on legislation. This is what that pledge looks like in practice: two regulators, moving on parallel but separate tracks, using the authority they already have rather than the jurisdictional lines a statute like CLARITY would have drawn for them.
Why that still isn't the same as a law
The distinction we raised in our cloture explainer applies here directly. A CFTC rule, once finalized, is binding — but it's also revisable by a future CFTC under a future administration, the way guidance is, in a way an act of Congress generally isn't. Industry groups that have spent years asking for CLARITY-style legislation have said as much publicly: rulemaking is useful and can move faster than Congress, but it isn't the durable, harder-to-unwind clarity a statute would provide. That tension doesn't go away just because the agencies are moving. If anything, it's the whole reason this is worth watching rather than treating as a substitute for the bill that didn't pass.