SEC and CFTC Unleash Crypto Relief After Clarity Act Fails Senate Vote

The US SEC and CFTC have issued crypto-market relief measures following the Senate's defeat of the Clarity Act. On Thursday, just two days after the act failed its cloture vote, both agencies issued their rules within hours of each other.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins announced that his agency would use its existing authority to deliver certainty for American investors, while CFTC Chair Mike Selig said his agency was 'locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance.'

The SEC's order grants a five-year exemption allowing Tokenized Securities Venues to trade tokenized versions of NMS-listed stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools without registering as traditional exchanges. The relief comes with conditions, including that tokenized shares must carry identical rights to their traditional counterparts.

The CFTC's Market Participants Division separately said it would not recommend enforcement action against passive software providers for failing to register as introducing brokers so long as their software only facilitates trades routed to registered futures commission merchants and the providers do not custody user funds or make trading decisions on users' behalf.