RIN 3038-AF80 arrived at OIRA on September 17 under a title naming two regulations, crypto asset transactions and crypto asset markets. The rule has never appeared in a Unified Agenda, so no abstract, timetable or text exists publicly.
The CFTC sent its crypto market rules to the White House on Thursday, two days after the Senate refused to open debate on the bill that was supposed to write them into law. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs lists the submission under RIN 3038-AF80, received September 17 and marked pending review, with the title "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets".
That title describes two regulations rather than one, and it matches the structure the agency's chairman sketched out in August. Michael Selig said then that the approach "could enable current registrants as well as non-registrant crypto exchanges to be designated by the CFTC as a type of DCM known as a crypto asset market and offer crypto asset trading on a leveraged or margined basis subject to purpose-fit rules under the CFTC's regulatory oversight". A designated contract market is the CFTC's existing category for a regulated exchange. Selig's version would add a crypto variant of it rather than build a separate regime.
Nobody outside the agency and the White House can read the rules. The submission has no public text, and it has no abstract either: the rule's own page on the federal regulatory site returns a single line, "This rule has not been published in a Unified Agenda." The Unified Agenda is the twice-yearly list on which agencies preview what they intend to write, with a summary, a legal authority and a timetable for each entry. RIN 3038-AF80 has never appeared on one. The CFTC declined to comment on the rulemaking when The Block asked.
Executive Order 12866 gives the White House up to 90 days to review a draft rule, with a single 30-day extension available. CoinDesk reported that this filing is marked as not economically significant, which is the designation that usually moves a review along faster; the search listing reachable from outside does not display that field, so the timing rests on that reporting rather than on the docket. Review clears a draft; it does not publish one. Any text still has to be issued by the Commission before it reaches the Federal Register.
This is now the normal route. The SEC put its custody rule through the same process in August, and MiningPool noted at the time that nobody outside the agency had seen it either. What has changed is the reason. Until Tuesday the agencies were writing rules alongside a market structure bill that would have given them new authority; since Tuesday they are writing rules instead of one.
The Senate's cloture vote on the CLARITY Act drew 49 votes to 50, eleven short of the 60 needed to begin formal debate. The bill would have set a statutory division of crypto oversight between the CFTC and the SEC. A rule written under existing authority cannot do that. It can only arrange what the CFTC already has, which is jurisdiction over commodity derivatives and over fraud and manipulation in spot commodity markets, and it leaves the boundary with the SEC where the two agencies find it.
The difference matters for how durable the result is. A statute survives a change of administration and binds both agencies at once. A rule can be repealed by the agency that wrote it, struck down in court, or reversed under the Congressional Review Act, and it binds only the agency that issued it. Selig is taking the route that is available rather than the one that would settle the question.
The agency is not idle on the product side while this sits at the White House. Coinbase Derivatives filed on Friday to list perpetual futures on individual US stocks as security futures, a category the CFTC shares with the SEC, and Hyperliquid's policy arm spent August pressing both regulators to treat equity perpetuals that way. Those filings are being handled under the rules that exist. The package at the White House is about what replaces them.
What the submission actually contains is not established by anything public. The docket gives a RIN, a title, a receipt date and a status. It does not say whether the Commission has approved the text, whether the rules would arrive as a proposal or as an earlier-stage notice, what comment period they would carry, or when any of it would take effect. Coverage that lays out dates for a comment period and a final rule is projecting from the ordinary path of a rulemaking, not reading the filing.
The listing shows no concluded date and no final action. Under the order's outer limits, a review that started on September 17 and ran its full course with the extension would finish in mid-January 2027.
