THE CFTC CHAIRMAN TELLS THE NEW YORK FED TO READY THE MARKETS FOR “MASS TOKENIZATION” — “TOKENIZATION CAN DO THE SAME FOR ALL ASSET CLASSES” — EVERY INSTRUMENT HE NAMED IS A STAFF LETTER, AN FAQ, AN ADVISORY OR A REQUEST FOR COMMENT
Michael Selig, the chairman of the CFTC, spoke at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on September 22 at the 2026 U.S. Treasury Market Conference. His slot ran fifteen minutes, 3:20 to 3:35, immediately before a panel called “Treasury Market Functioning After GENIUS: Stablecoins, Tokenized Deposits, and Short-Term Funding.” He used the fifteen minutes to say what comes next. Preparing the markets for the new frontier of finance, he said, “means readying our markets for mass tokenization.” Then he went further: “Just as the transition from hand signals to electronic trading advanced our financial system, I believe tokenization can do the same for all asset classes.”
All asset classes. Now read his own footnotes for how he gets there. The list of eligible tokenized collateral was expanded by CFTC Letter No. 26-05, a staff no-action position dated February 6. The rules for using that collateral are frequently asked questions, published March 20, which the agency “continues to iterate on.” The 24/7 question is a request for comment from June and a staff advisory, Letter No. 26-16. The cross-margining came by exemptive order. Not one of those is a statute. The statute the industry spent a year on lost its cloture vote in the Senate seven days ago.
He is careful about the sequencing and says so. The Commission will not take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to continuous trading. Crypto and precious metals “may currently be suitable” for it. Agricultural products, energy and certain financials “may not.” Hear what that concedes. The one asset class already trading every hour of every day, with no letter and no advisory and no comment period, is the thing the rest of the market is being rebuilt to imitate.
What he is promising to build is “near-instantaneous settlement and real-time collateral mobility across clearinghouses, intermediaries, and end users.” Bitcoin has settled finally, around the clock, for seventeen years without asking anyone. The difference is what the token is. The tokenized collateral he just made eligible is a payment stablecoin issued by a national trust bank, which is to say somebody else's liability, admitted by a staff letter, and a staff letter is withdrawn by the next chairman on a Tuesday. His agency is already in federal court in Washington over borrowed authority: CME is suing the CFTC, arguing perpetual contracts are not futures at all. That is the cost of building a financial system out of letters. Somebody eventually asks to see the paperwork. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $86,233.