The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) held their first joint roundtable in nearly 14 years.
The discussion highlighted that the two agencies intend to cooperate on crypto regulation, despite having little history of collaboration.
Alignment on Crypto Rules
Acting CFTC Chair Caroline Pham acknowledged at Monday’s roundtable that while the SEC and CFTC have had many opportunities to work together for market participants and global capital markets, unclear regulatory boundaries have sometimes caused friction and difficulties for the public.
Pham said she was pleased that both regulators are now aligning rules to reduce unnecessary costs, support responsible innovation, and create fair competition. She pointed to the SEC’s Project Crypto and the CFTC’s Crypto Sprint as early examples of coordination, suggesting that greater harmonization could lead to increased efficiency, clarity, and expanded investor access to digital assets.
Addressing concerns about the CFTC’s effectiveness, Pham reported that from January 20 to September 3, the agency has carried out 18 non-enforcement actions and 13 enforcement actions, with some involving digital asset lawsuits. Since September 4, the Commission has initiated 14 more legal proceedings in just a few weeks.
The acting chair said these figures show that the CFTC is active and effective, adding that “there needs to be no more FUD about what’s happening on the other side of town.”
The roundtable also featured panels on market structure and innovation, with discussions on topics such as extended trading hours, perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and crypto assets. The participants included executives from major crypto firms such as Kraken, Robinhood, and Crypto.com.
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On the sidelines of the recent event, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said that crypto is the agency’s “top priority right now.” He also identified asset tokenization as a key area of regulatory focus, cautioning that it may take a year or two to establish proper guardrails, and described its potential as “pretty much endless.”
Earlier in the year, the financial watchdog had held discussions on tokenization and crypto regulation, with the aim of harmonizing rules amid increasing crypto adoption.
Tensions Rise Over Classification of Tokenized Securities
Elsewhere, the crypto X community has reignited debate over how tokenized securities should be classified. The conversation follows tensions at the recent joint panel, where traditional finance representatives resisted innovation exemptions and advocated for strict fungibility requirements under Reg NMS.
Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro argued that tokenized securities should indeed be fungible. In response, former regulatory adviser Justin Slaughter questioned the belief that these instruments are inherently derivatives, suggesting they could represent either the underlying asset itself or an idealized version. Shapiro countered that such ambiguity may reflect poor tokenization practices through SPVs and similar structures, compared with more native approaches like Superstate or MetaLeX.
