The U.S. Senate couldn't find the votes for the CLARITY Act in September — a bill meant to finally settle who regulates what between the SEC and CFTC and close the biggest gap: oversight of spot trading in bitcoin and ether. The procedural vote on September 15 landed at 49 in favor against the 60 needed, and Congress shelved the issue with no clear timeline for another try.
Rather than wait for lawmakers to try again, the CFTC and SEC moved on their own. On October 5, both agencies unveiled a pair of rules for leveraged and margined crypto trading: Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM. CTX requires these trades to run through registered futures commission merchants, with anti-money-laundering checks built in. CAM creates a new registration category for crypto exchanges — a narrower version of the status traditional commodity markets already hold.
CFTC Chairman Mike Selig framed it as giving exchanges "a pathway to operate under uniform national oversight." But the fine print matters: these rules only cover margin and leverage. Buying bitcoin outright at the current price — plain spot trading — still falls under state money-transmission law. The CFTC can chase fraud and manipulation there, but it can't license or supervise the exchanges and brokers running that market.
The SEC had already made its own move in August, proposing Regulation Crypto Assets with lighter fundraising thresholds — up to $20 million for some offerings and $75 million for others, without full registration. Neither step replaces actual legislation, though. Protecting customers if an exchange goes bankrupt, and classifying tokens cleanly under anti-money-laundering law, both require an act of Congress that neither agency can substitute on its own.
Lawyers tracking the rulemaking don't expect anything binding before late 2027. Until then, big exchanges get partial clarity on margin and leverage, while the millions of people simply buying crypto on the spot market stay exactly where they were.
