U.S. President Donald Trump has selected Securities and Exchange official Michael Selig as his latest nominee to lead the CFTC, according to a Friday Bloomberg report.
Selig currently serves as chief counsel for the SEC’s crypto task force, and has been a key player behind the agency’s aggressively pro-crypto overhaul during the second Trump administration.
His selection to head the CFTC is the clearest sign yet that the regulator will work in lockstep with the SEC to jointly build a pro-crypto regulatory framework.
It also marks a key political victory for Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Trump-aligned crypto billionaire twins, who successfully lobbied the president to drop his previous pick to lead the CFTC, Andreessen Horowitz Global Head of Crypto Policy Brian Quintenz.
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For months, the Winklevoss brothers doggedly pushed to derail Quintenz’s nomination, partly because of what they perceived as his lack of sufficient outrage about the CFTC’s 2022 lawsuit against their crypto exchange, Gemini. The messy feud, which eventually became public, ultimately led to the White House pulling Quintenz’s nomination.
The Winklevosses also protested Quintenz’s nomination due to the former CFTC commissioner’s suggestion that the relatively tiny CFTC should increase its budget to better handle the massive new responsibilities involved in principally regulating the crypto market. The twins argued that increasing the agency’s capacities would lead to “regulatory capture.”
As head of the CFTC, Selig would also be responsible for spearheading the agency’s approach to regulating prediction markets—another novel sector that has mushroomed in popularity, and posed thorny legal questions, since emerging in the last year.
Selig’s nomination comes at one of the most crucial junctures for the CFTC in its 50 year history, given the policies it lays out in the coming years will define the rules for two massive, emergent sectors currently redefining the lucrative worlds of finance and gambling.
The agency is also greatly lacking in staffing. Usually comprised of a bipartisan group of five commissioners, the CFTC is currently operating under the leadership of a single Republican commissioner, Acting Chair Caroline Pham.
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