CFTC Moves Toward Federal Rules for Crypto Exchanges After the Clarity Act Stalls

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is moving to build a federal framework for cryptocurrency exchanges after Congress failed to pass legislation that would have set market structure rules for much of the digital asset industry. For crypto businesses and their payment partners, the point is simple: the CFTC is now trying to define when crypto activity lands under federal supervision, and the line may run through custody, leverage, and “actual delivery.”

1. The CFTC published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on Monday, Oct. 5, laying out two linked frameworks: Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions, or Regulation CTX, and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets, or Regulation CAM. Because this is an ANPRM, the agency is asking for public input before it drafts formal rules. Once the notice is published in the Federal Register, the public will have 60 days to comment.
2. Regulation CTX would build on an existing provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that requires retail commodity transactions involving leverage, margin or financing to take place on a CFTC-registered exchange unless the commodity is actually delivered to the purchaser. The agency is considering a broad reading of that authority. According to the report, even offering leverage in standard onboarding documents or terms of service could pull fully paid crypto transactions under CFTC oversight if the assets stay on an exchange’s internal books instead of being transferred to a customer’s wallet.
3. That makes “actual delivery” the key dividing line between state and federal regulation. The CFTC suggested that actual delivery could require customers to control their private keys. Under that reading, decentralized or on-chain protocols that send tokens directly to customer wallets would generally meet the standard. For operators, that is not a technical footnote; it is the difference between being treated like a regulated venue and being outside the federal perimeter.
4. Regulation CAM would create a new “crypto asset market” registration category, modeled on the designated contract market framework that governs futures exchanges. Transactions on registered crypto asset markets would generally flow through futures commission merchants subject to anti-money laundering requirements, according to the report. Leverage could be provided only by those intermediaries or sponsor entities.
5. The backdrop matters here. The move follows the collapse of the Clarity Act, which failed in the Senate last month after Congress spent much of the past two years debating how to divide responsibility for digital assets among federal regulators. In other words, the statute did not arrive, so the agency is trying the rulebook route instead.

For high-risk operators, this is the part to watch: the CFTC is not just talking about exchange registration in the abstract. It is setting up a framework that could tie regulatory status to how funds move, whether leverage is mentioned, and whether the user ever takes control of the asset. That is the kind of rulemaking that can redraw where onboarding, custody, and settlement sit in the stack.