The @CFTC wants jurisdiction to cover crypto futures, GPU futures, and prediction markets and intends to rule-make to achieve it. And if Congress can’t pass CLARITY, Chairman Michael Selig says he’ll start writing the crypto rules himself. At the CFTC’s first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting today, Selig laid out three fronts. Crypto: staff are exploring a new class of Designated Contract Market (DCM) called a “crypto asset market,” potentially giving registered and unregistered crypto exchanges a route to offer leveraged and margined trading under CFTC oversight. He also wants a legal pathway for onchain protocol developers. The Senate’s first procedural vote on CLARITY is September 15. If Congress stalls, Selig intends to propose rules anyway. Compute: the CFTC yesterday asked for comment on compute derivatives, including perpetual futures on compute. Prediction markets: new rules are coming on retail protections, product governance and incentives. Selig also mocked states that see “sports futures” and immediately call them gambling, borrowing the phrase “Name Fixation Syndrome.” They all will use same license: the DCM. - Kalshi is a DCM. - Coinbase Derivatives is a DCM. - Bitnomial used a DCM to launch leveraged spot crypto. - Compute derivatives would trade on DCMs. The DCM is becoming the wrapper for markets that don’t fit neatly inside securities law. And Selig gave the legal theory. Congress defined “commodity” in 1974 to include not only goods, but “services, rights, and interests.” He then cited a 1978 Senate report saying whether a market performs traditional hedging or price discovery “should not be the determining factor” in CFTC jurisdiction. That is the argument for why a sports contract can be a federally regulated derivative rather than state gambling. It is also how a GPU hour can become the underlying for a perpetual future. Play it forward and you get: → Hyperliquid-style perp venues operating onshore under a US derivatives license → A GPU forward curve lenders can use to underwrite data center debt → Sports contracts governed by federal market rules rather than 50 different state regimes The states have a legitimate consumer protection argument. Selig effectively conceded that. His answer is to build those protections into Parts 38 and 40 rather than concede jurisdiction. The CFTC already oversees roughly half of a $1.2 quadrillion notional derivatives market. Now it is trying to pull crypto, compute and prediction markets into the same machine. Where the SEC has Howey, the CFTC has “rights and interests.” That may turn out to be the more expansive phrase.