Bessent Says Treasury Will Back SEC and CFTC Crypto Rulemaking as CFTC Exchange Proposal Heads Toward Dec. 14 Comment Deadline

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put the weight of his department behind agency-led crypto regulation on Tuesday, Oct. 27, weeks after the Senate sank the CLARITY Act and as the CFTC's proposed framework for federal crypto exchanges moves through its comment period.

Speaking with Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse at Ripple's Swell conference in New York, Bessent called the Senate failure disappointing. He said Treasury could work with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to address the regulatory gaps. "At Treasury, we have a lot of convening powers," he said, calling the two agencies "great partners."

What Bessent actually committed to

His remarks describe a direction, not a finished rule. No new Treasury rule, joint order or formal agency agreement was announced at the event.

Bessent also raised debanking, the practice of banks cutting off crypto firms. "I think we can set up regulatory best practices, guardrails that will prevent that from happening again," he said.

He tied the policy to the dollar. Reserve-currency power, he argued, once rested largely on military strength. "We will keep our military umbrella, but increasingly, it becomes a technological umbrella," he said, grouping digital assets with AI and semiconductors as areas where the U.S. and China compete.

He pointed to stablecoins as the concrete link, saying they can give people in high-inflation countries easier access to dollars. He put the dollar-pegged share of the market above 90%. CoinGecko data puts it above 98%, led by Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC.

The vote that sent the work to the agencies

The Senate voted 49 to 50 on Sept. 15 on cloture on the motion to proceed, 11 votes short of the 60 required. Because the vote was procedural, the bill was never debated or amended.

Two disputes sank it: ethics provisions covering federal officials' crypto holdings, and whether stablecoin issuers can pay yield or rewards. Banks and the White House clashed over the yield terms.

Senate Democrats argued the ethics provisions, which would bar federal officials from profiting from digital asset ventures while in office, contained enforcement loopholes and did not go far enough.

The argument over how to divide oversight between the SEC and CFTC was not what killed the bill. Both parties largely agreed on that split, which would have given the CFTC oversight of decentralized digital commodities and left fundraising and investment contracts with the SEC.

Where the agencies already stood

The agencies were moving before Bessent spoke. The SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets on Aug. 18. On Sept. 17 it issued a five-year conditional Innovation Exemption allowing qualifying venues to trade tokenized versions of listed U.S. stocks. Atkins described that order as a bridge that "must be followed by durable rulemaking."

On Oct. 5, the CFTC issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking titled "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets." Comments are due Dec. 14.

The notice lays out a federal exchange subcategory called the Crypto Asset Market, or CAM. Renato Mariotti, a partner at Paul Hastings, said it is not a proposed rule yet. A formal proposal comes next, and he does not expect a final rule before late 2027.

Dorothy DeWitt, a former Director of the CFTC's Division of Market Oversight and former Coinbase general counsel, said the limits are legal. Without CLARITY, she said, the agencies must tie whatever they do to the existing Commodity Exchange Act and federal securities laws. They can supply more rules of the road, she said, but cannot create the expanded jurisdiction the bill would have.

The durability problem

Agency rules can be rewritten by the next administration or challenged in court. Atkins has himself argued that legislation is still needed for rules a future regulator cannot undo.

JPMorgan said last week that regulator actions partly offset the CLARITY setback, but that political and legal risks remain until Congress passes a market structure law. The bank sees passage as unlikely this year and possibly back on the table in 2027. Pantera Capital's chief legal officer, Katrina Paglia, wrote that prediction markets put the odds of passage this year in the single digits after the vote.

On the stablecoin side, the Comptroller of the Currency has finalized its rule implementing the GENIUS Act. The federal framework for payment stablecoin issuers takes effect Jan. 18, 2027.

The next dated step is the Dec. 14 comment deadline on the CFTC's notice. After that, the CFTC must issue a formal proposal, and no timetable for it has been announced.

Whether the Senate takes the bill up again, and whether the ethics and stablecoin-yield disputes can be settled, will decide whether any of this work ends up in statute.