U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Mike Selig, told senators in his Wednesday confirmation hearing that he’ll champion the president’s intention to set a U.S. path for crypto regulation.
The Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC that will be a leading U.S. regulator for crypto, weighed Selig’s nomination, and Chairman John Boozman asked about digital asset oversight in his first question.
“The CFTC has a critical mission to protect these markets,” Selig said. He told the lawmakers, “This is a real opportunity to develop a framework that can allow for software developers to thrive, for new exchanges to crop up that are going to protect investors and have the types of controls that you would expect in an exchange and make sure that we have the right disclosure requirements that we have typically in our financial markets.”
The agency has been run by Acting Chairman Caroline Pham since the start of the year, when Trump named her to the temporary role. She’s set an aggressive agenda for crypto, speaking as recently as this week on the number of digital assets initiatives at the agency. But Pham has been planning her departure for months, awaiting a permanent replacement but being stymied in her departure when Trump’s previous choice — former Commissioner Brian Quintenz — was withdrawn.
Selig may take over the CFTC soon, as the committee has already set a consideration of his confirmation for Thursday afternoon, which could send him to the full Senate for a final vote. If he’s confirmed, he’ll become the sole member of what’s meant to be a five-member, bipartisan commission. That will come with efficiency, as he’ll be the only commissioner who needs to approve moves in crypto policy, but some agency observers wonder if the missing commissioners will make the agency’s actions vulnerable to legal challenge.
At the moment, Selig has been a top official working on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force, so he’s well-versed in the ongoing policy needs for the industry. At the hearing, he was asked about decentralized finance (DeFi), a controversial topic in the ongoing negotiations in Congress over a U.S. crypto market structure bill.
“Blockchain enables such a broad swath of new types of products, services, applications, and so it may not make sense in many cases to apply financial regulation, for example, to a video game app that runs on a blockchain,” Selig said. “So I think when we’re thinking about DeFi, it’s something of a buzzword, but really we should be looking to onchain markets and onchain applications, and thinking about the features of these applications, as well as where there’s an actual intermediary involved.”
As lawmakers mentioned during the hearing, the agency is as much as 20% reduced in staff recently as the Trump administration has reduced the federal workforce, and it’s taking on new duties — including oversight of crypto activity. But Selig wouldn’t commit to increasing the staff levels at the agency, saying he’d have to take a look once he arrives. People familiar with the CFTC’s internal planning have said that the agency is putting some focus on the enforcement division, trying to increase that staff again and set up a specialty trial unit though the hiring of experienced government prosecutors.
When asked about bitcoin mining, Selig called it “vitally important infrastructure.”
“We should have them built in the United States,” Selig said. “We should make sure that we’re protecting our miners and infrastructure.”
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