As President Donald Trump’s opening year wanes in his second administration, he’s finally landed permanent appointments to helm two of the most important U.S. crypto regulators — Mike Selig as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Travis Hill as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The CFTC is poised to become a leading regulator of U.S. crypto activity, especially if Congress completes the legislative work to give more specific crypto authority to the derivatives watchdog. The Senate approved Selig and Hill in a package of dozens of other nominees on Thursday with a 53-43 vote. Once sworn in, Selig will take over from Acting Chairman Caroline Pham, who has led a range of pro-crypto policy initiatives as she’s waited for a permanent replacement at the agency.
Pham has long planned to join MoonPay, a U.S.-based crypto infrastructure service provider, as chief legal officer and chief administrative officer when she leaves the agency, as CoinDesk reported last month.
When Selig, who has been working on crypto policies as an official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, takes over, some of the digital assets tasks already underway in the CFTC’s so-called “crypto sprint” include a push for including stablecoins in tokenized collateral and a rulemaking to insert blockchain technology into regulatory language across the agency. The agency has also encouraged regulated platforms to begin issuing spot leveraged crypto products, and Bitnomial was the first to step up and pursue such an offering.
One of Selig’s complicating factors as he leaps into crypto work is the fact that the CFTC’s five-member commission has been allowed to dwindle to a single member. Pham said she’s planning to depart as soon as Selig arrives, which will leave him as the solo member of the commission. While that reduces friction in how easy it’ll be for him to institute policies, it could leave some uncertainty about legal vulnerability for challenges that its policies are being properly established.
And he’ll also arrive as Congress continues work on a significant bill to overhaul the agency’s powers to give it explicit authority over wider crypto spot trading. Such legislation has already passed in the House of Representatives this year, but it’s now being worked on in the Senate, where the Senate Banking Committee may still hold a markup hearing on that effort before the month is out, according to close observers of the negotiations.
At the FDIC, which will regulate stablecoin issuers and has a significant impact on how the crypto industry is banked, Hill has already been running the agency as an acting chairman. In that role, he’s taken a crypto-friendly posture.
“We undid the policy of the past few years,” he told lawmakers in a Dec. 2 hearing at the House Financial Services Committee, referring to a Biden administration era stance in which banking regulators told bankers that they needed approval from government supervisors before engaging in new crypto activity. “Banks are expected to manage the safety and soundness risk, but otherwise have no prohibitions to serving those those industries.”
Hill has taken a leading role, too, in addressing crypto industry complaints over so-called “debanking” in which banks severed their relationships with crypto businesses and their executives, a situation that industry insiders and many of their Republican lawmakers allies say was encouraged by regulatory policy.
The absence of permanent leaders at the CFTC and FDIC remained two of the more glaring vacancies in Trump administration crypto oversight. He’d already placed people at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in addition to the leadership at the Department of the Treasury. Trump has been chipping away at the Federal Reserve Board, where his vice chairman for supervision nominee, Michelle Bowman, took over in June. However, he’s still waiting to replace Chairman Jerome Powell when his term expires next year.
Republicans in the Senate have turned to an unusual, mass-confirmation approach to Trump’s federal nominees. In the resolution that approved these two officials, 97 confirmation questions were attached to the same document, dodging a traditional confirmation process in which the Senate assessed each nominee individually.
Read More: Trump’s CFTC Pick, Mike Selig, Clears Hurdle on Way Toward Confirmation Vote
