Formerly acting chair of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Caroline Pham feels that existing laws regulating commodities would allow the market watchdog to take broad powers over cryptocurrency markets.
Speaking on stage at TOKEn2049 in Singapore, Pham said most crypto activities would be covered by current law with no need for Congress to pass a new measure, as she works as the chief legal and administrative officer at MoonPay.
THE BLOCK: MoonPay CLO & Former CFTC Commissioner Caroline Pham explains why crypto does not need Congress and can proceed through agency rulemaking alone.
“There is very little that the CFTC’s jurisdiction doesn’t touch, because the way that the Commodity Exchange Act is drafted, pretty much everything is a commodity except for onions and movie box office receipts,” Pham told The Block.
— The Block (@TheBlockCo) October 12, 2026
Her comments followed the proposed CLARITY Act failing to gain ground in September. Pham cited the broad language used in the definition of a commodity in the Commodity Exchange Act, although she acknowledged that defining an asset as a commodity does not give CFTC unlimited authority over all its transactions.
On October 5, an advance notice of proposed rulemaking covering crypto-asset transactions and markets with consultation started. Consultation is seeking comments on the applicability of the existing rules to leveraged, margined and financed crypto transactions to retail customers pursuant to Section 2(c)(2)(D) of the Commodity Exchange Act.
Present CFTC Chair Michael Selig has said Congress would need to act if it were to require all exchanges to register, but existing law may already let businesses that facilitate certain forms of retail trading to register with the regulator. Pham felt the effort to get a definitive framework which would help protect retail investors was welcome.
Pham spoke of the possible benefits of tokenized assets in traditional finance, saying tokenized deposits by banks may be more suited to wholesale financial activity that involves net settlement than stablecoins. She estimated the requirement to offset all obligations owed within a full day of trading which could be immediately settled would require about $15 trillion in cash. This was her view of a possible requirement, rather than an official forecast, but she said stablecoins could support payments between counterparties who lacked trust in themselves.
Pham believes truly tokenized shares of publicly-listed firms will appear on exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq around 2028 but they should give shareholders real rights, not merely synthetic products tracking the prices of shares.
Several events point towards this. The US Securities and Exchange Commission announced conditional exemptions for eligible tokenized securities venues on 17 September. Nasdaq and Payward have also announced plans in relation to a $100 million investment and equity tokens, which are expected in the second quarter of 2027 with development and regulatory requirements in place.
Pham sees possible applications for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for rewards, memberships and customer loyalty programmes but her general point is that she would already use existing laws to regulate digital assets while governments and businesses worked through how traditional financial rules would be applied to new technology.
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