Trump mulls tapping crypto-friendly CFTC chair: Report
2024-11-15

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is considering current and former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) officials to chair the financial regulatory agency, according to Reuters News. 
The CFTC plays a crucial role in regulated cryptocurrency markets in the United States, second only to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 
Summer Mersinger, a Republican CFTC commissioner who has urged the regulator to take a more accommodating stance on crypto, is among those under consideration to chair the agency, Reuters reported.
Reuters said Mersinger is a frontrunner for the position, in part because she was a top aide to Republican Senator John Thune from 2004 to 2016. Thune was tapped to lead the US Senate after Republicans won a majority on Nov. 5.
Mersinger has objected to the CFTC’s handling of enforcement actions against crypto firms, criticizing the agency for what Mersinger described as “regulation through enforcement.” 
“It was my hope that one day soon the commission would consider rulemaking, or at the very least guidance, making clear how DeFi protocols could comply with them,” Mersinger said on Sept. 4.
Other contenders include former Republican CFTC commissioner Jill Sommers and Josh Sterling, partner at law firm Milbank and a former CFTC official, according to Reuters.
Trump has not announced a planned replacement for the SEC’s chair, Gary Gensler. On Nov. 14, former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo said he will not be stepping into the role.
“I’ve made clear that I’ve already cleaned up earlier Gary Gensler mess @CFTC and don’t want to have do it again,” Giancarlo said in a post on the X platform.
The crypto market surged following Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, as many believe his win will have a significant impact on the industry, Cointelegraph Research said.
On Nov. 11, shares of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase rose more than 20%, pushing the stock past $300 for the first time since 2021.
“We see Coinbase as a beneficiary of the election results as the firm has been struggling with regulatory pressure from the SEC, with the firm actively fighting the agency in court,” Michale Miller, an equities researcher at Morningstar Inc., said in a Nov. 7 research note.
Trump’s presidential win is also a greenlight for more than half a dozen proposed crypto ETFs waiting on regulatory approval to list in the US.
In 2024, asset managers submitted a flurry of regulatory filings to list ETFs holding altcoins, including Solana SOL XRPXRP and LitecoinLTC among others.
Issuers are also waiting on approval for several planned crypto index ETFs designed to hold diverse baskets of tokens.