The U.S. regulatory landscape for digital asset trading shifted sharply this week after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission published an early plan to create a federal licensing framework for crypto exchanges. The proposal, released about three weeks after the Clarity Act died in the Senate, asks for public input and offers 60 days to comment once it appears in the Federal Register. It is built around two pieces: Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM, and would cover trades involving borrowed money — or even fully paid trades if an exchange mentions leverage in its terms and holds customer crypto on its own books.
The CFTC’s proposed license would allow companies to match buyers and sellers, hold customer money and crypto, settle trades, and lend, with separate approvals for each activity. Trades would have to run through brokers already subject to anti-money-laundering rules, and only those brokers or their sponsoring banks could provide leverage. Customer protections would include separating customer funds, record-keeping, market manipulation monitoring, loan verification and loss planning. The agency is also weighing proof-of-reserves requirements and standards against listing easily manipulated tokens. CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said the rules are designed to prevent fraud like FTX rather than prosecute it afterward, and he posted a promotional video to make the point.
Industry participants read the proposal as the clearest path yet for U.S. platforms to offer perpetual futures onshore. Robinhood has already announced U.S. crypto perps, Coinbase has filed for single-stock perps, and Kraken's parent is negotiating with Hyperliquid. The potential for easier onboarding and broader institutional participation gave crypto markets a constructive tone, though major assets were mostly flat. Bitcoin traded around $86,300, Ethereum around $2,714, and Solana around $120.
In a related regulatory development, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved six funds that triple the daily moves of Bitcoin, Ethereum, gold, silver, oil and gas, clearing a Cboe rule change on October 2. This move gives U.S. investors access to 3x leveraged exposure to BTC and ETH, directly affecting those assets. Meanwhile, ETF flows were negative on Monday, with Bitcoin ETFs seeing $90 million in net outflows and Ethereum ETFs seeing $51 million in outflows.
The prediction market sector also made news. Polymarket unveiled its Protocol V2, with settlement now pulling from both UMA and Chainlink instead of one source, a change that directly touches the oracle and dispute-resolution infrastructure used by the platform. The broader prediction market audience is growing: NEXT.io's Pierre Lindh said nobody was serving prediction markets to "real journalistic standards," and the audience for it dwarfs the trading base. The first global B2B conference for the sector, NEXTPredict, runs October 22–23 at Convene, Hudson Yards in New York, with CNBC's Contessa Brewer and CNN's Marshall Cohen among more than 50 speakers and 2,500 expected attendees. Polymarket's monthly active users sit around 283,300, down from a peak above 750,000 in the spring, while Kalshi said it took on 3 million new users over the 2026 World Cup and saw more than $1.2 billion traded on its tournament winner contract.
