SEC, CFTC Chiefs Say Crypto Turf Wars Over as Agencies Move Ahead on Joint Work

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission plan to hold a joint roundtable as a next step in their efforts to make the U.S. markets friendlier to financial firms, including crypto businesses.

The heads of the agencies — SEC Chair Paul Atkins and Acting CFTC Chair Caroline Pham — announced a joint roundtable for later this month to discuss prediction markets, decentralized finance and 24/7 trading in traditional financial markets, among other issues. The agencies also published a joint statement outlining their push for "greater harmonization" between the two agencies.

"It's time to leave turf aside and really collaborate," Atkins said during a press call on Friday morning.

During the previous administration, the two agencies were sometimes at odds over the policing of crypto, even though their leaders were both Democrats appointed by former President Joe Biden. Gary Gensler, the ex-chief of the SEC, set himself up as a crypto antagonist, taking companies to court and refusing to move forward on comprehensive crypto regulations, while then-CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam was marginally more open to conversations with the industry.

For instance, the two agencies adopted distinct positions on which crypto assets were securities and which were commodities, including Ethereum's ETH, which both seemed to claim under their jurisdictions at different times.

In the Friday call, Atkins and Pham presented a new united front as the two say they're trying to bring innovators back from overseas jurisdictions and to get set to oversee modern, round-the-clock markets.

Asked by CoinDesk whether the regulator had the resources to police 24/7 trading, as the agencies suggested in their joint statement, Atkins pointed to self-regulatory organizations as the entities that would take on the bulk of the work.

"It's the markets themselves, the SROs that are charged with looking at the trading on their own platforms," he said. "And so obviously, then we have other ways that we track what's going on and [we] depend on their alerting us."

Atkins threw a follow-up question about a possible SRO for the crypto industry to Congress, saying the agency was involved in the market structure legislation currently working its way through the legislature.

Pham, who's overseen the CFTC while the Senate mulls President Donald Trump's nominee Brian Quintenz, said the agency did not need additional staffing to continue its mandate of overseeing non-securities markets.

"By consolidating many of the activities at the agency, we're actually better able to have the maximum productivity and capacity available," she said. "We are doing great with all of our initiatives, and we look forward to continuing to work on this together with the SEC."

Read more: U.S. SEC's Atkins Posts Agency's Near-Term Agenda Jammed With Crypto Efforts