As President Donald Trump’s inaugural year winds down in his second administration, he has finally made permanent appointments to lead two of the main US 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 US crypto activity, especially if Congress completes legislative work to provide more specific crypto authority for derivatives oversight. The Senate approved Selig and Hill in a package with dozens of other nominees Thursday by a vote of 53-43. Once Selig is sworn in, she will take over from Acting Chair Caroline Pham, who has led a number of pro-crypto policy initiatives while waiting for a permanent replacement at the agency.
Pham has long planned to join MoonPay, a US-based provider of crypto infrastructure services, as chief legal officer and CEO when she leaves the agency, as CoinDesk reported last month.
When Selig, who has worked on crypto policies as an official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, takes over, some of the digital asset tasks already underway in the CFTC’s so-called “crypto sprint” include a push to include 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 start issuing spot-delivered crypto products, and Bitnomial was the first to step up and pursue such an offering.
One of Selig’s complicating factors as he jumps into the crypto business is the fact that the CFTC’s five-member commission has been allowed to shrink to a single member. Pham said she plans to leave as soon as Selig arrives, which will leave him as the solo member of the commission. While that reduces friction in how easy it will be for him to enact policies, it may leave some uncertainty about legal vulnerability to challenges that its policies are being properly established.
And he will also arrive as Congress continues work on a significant bill to overhaul the agency’s powers to give it explicit authority over broader crypto spot trading. Such legislation has already passed the House of Representatives this year, but is now being worked on in the Senate, where the Senate Banking Committee may still hold a markup hearing on the effort before the month is out, according to close observers of the negotiations.
At the FDIC, which will regulate stablecoin issuers and has significant influence over how the crypto industry is bankrolled, Hill has already run the agency as acting chairman. In that role, he has taken a crypto-friendly stance.
“We have regretted the past few years of policy,” he told lawmakers in a Dec. 2 House Financial Services Committee hearing, referring to a Biden administration era in which bank regulators told bankers they needed approval from government regulators before engaging in new crypto activity. “Banks are expected to manage safety and health risk but are otherwise not prohibited from serving these industries.”
Hill has also taken a leading role in addressing the crypto industry’s complaints about so-called “debanking,” where banks severed their relationships with crypto companies and their executives, a situation that industry insiders and many of their Republican lawmakers’ allies say was encouraged by regulatory politics.
The absence of permanent heads at the CFTC and FDIC remained two of the more glaring vacancies in the Trump administration’s crypto oversight. He had already placed people in the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in addition to the leadership of the Department of Treasury. Trump has lashed out at the Federal Reserve Board, where his oversight committee vice chair, Michelle Bowman, took over in June. However, he is still waiting to replace Chairman Jerome Powell when his term ends next year.
Senate Republicans have turned to an unusual, mass confirmation approach to Trump’s federal nominees. In the resolution approving these two officials, 97 confirmation questions were attached to the same document, avoiding a traditional confirmation process in which the Senate evaluates each candidate individually.
Read more: Trump’s CFTC pick, Mike Selig, clears hurdle on confirmation vote
