The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is choosing to update its answers rather than write new rules, at least for now. On September 24, the CFTC’s Market Participants Division, Division of Market Oversight, and Division of Clearing and Risk added four new questions to the crypto asset FAQs the divisions first issued in March 2026, extending the guidance to two areas that had been left open: whether customer funds can be invested in tokenized forms of otherwise permitted investments under Commission Regulation 1.25, and whether blockchain or distributed ledger technology can satisfy a registrant’s recordkeeping obligations under Regulations 1.31 and 45.2.
“I’m pleased to see staff update these frequently asked questions consistent with the agency’s ongoing efforts to provide regulatory clarity for the crypto industry,” said CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig in the agency’s announcement.
For registrants, this matters more than a routine FAQ refresh would suggest. Futures commission merchants have been sitting on two live operational questions: can they hold tokenized money-market or Treasury exposure as customer-fund collateral, and can they retire legacy recordkeeping systems for a distributed ledger without a compliance gap. Both previously required outside counsel guesswork or an informal call to CFTC staff. An interpretive FAQ carries no force of a formal rule, but it gives compliance teams something citable the next time an examiner asks why a tokenized asset sits inside a segregated customer account.
The original insight here is about sequencing, not content. The CFTC issued this FAQ set in March and has now extended it, six months later, rather than propose formal rulemaking on tokenized collateral or DLT recordkeeping. That pattern lets the agency move faster than federal rulemaking allows, but it also means the resulting clarity can be revised or withdrawn with far less procedural friction than a formal rule, something compliance teams building multi-year infrastructure around it should weigh. The same tension between fast-moving guidance and durable legal footing shows up in how stablecoin rules have filled in agency by agency, and in the dispute over which platforms need state-level authorization to operate prediction markets at all.
Source: CFTC
