Mike Selig just landed in his chairman post at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission a few weeks ago, and he’s now reconfiguring the agency with a rebuilt innovation committee that will start with a core of crypto insiders, according to a Monday statement.
His temporary predecessor, former Acting Chairman Caroline Pham, had quickly put together a group of chief executive officers focused on innovative financial technology in her final days at the agency, and Selig — just a month after that council was announced — is using that list of names as “charter members” of the Innovation Advisory Committee. That means the committee’s first members will be executives from such crypto firms as Gemini, Kraken, Bitnomial, Crypto.com and Bullish, which is the parent company of CoinDesk.
Apart from well-known crypto executives such as Gemini’s Tyler Winklevoss and Kraken’s Arjun Sethi, others who’d been announced last month as members of the CEO group included leaders of prediction market firms Polymarket and Kalshi, plus executives from more traditional names such as Nasdaq, CME Group, Intercontinental Exchange and Cboe Global Markets.
“Innovators are harnessing technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cloud computing to modernize legacy financial systems and build entirely new ones,” Selig said in a statement. “Under my leadership, the commission will develop fit-for-purpose market structure regulations for this new frontier of finance.”
He said the innovation committee, based on the former Technology Advisory Committee, will help the regulator as it writes those new rules. It becomes one of five such outside committees meant to help guide the agency on areas of the members’ expertise.
The agency, which is expected to be one of the leading U.S. regulators of crypto, asks the public to submit further member nominees and suggested topics of consideration by the end of January.
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