CFTC chair to step down when Trump takes office

The chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is slated to resign on Jan. 20, coinciding with President-elect Trump’s inauguration, leaving a vacancy for the federal regulatory agency, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

Rostin Behnam has served at the helm of the CFTC for four years, navigating new mandates for carbon offsets and tracking the rapidly developing cryptocurrency sector, which the second Trump administration has promised to propel.

Behnam warned of the lack of guidelines around digital assets, in an interview with the Financial Times.

“You still have a large swath of the digital asset space unregulated in the U.S. regulatory system and it’s important — given the adoption we’ve seen by some traditional financial institutions, the huge demand for these products by both the retail and institutional investors — that we fill this gap,” Behnam told the Financial Times.

The outgoing CFTC chair says the agency is well-positioned to be a “spot regulator” for “digital commodity assets.”

“It’s important to be very disciplined and intentional about how we write rules ultimately that are driven from the law,” he said.

Trump has pledged to make America the “crypto-capital” of the world, with Donald Trump Jr. headlining a recent Bitcoin conference and helping to run World Liberty Financial, a crypto trading platform.

Whoever replaces Behnam could be a key figure in Trump's efforts to promote crypto, along with Paul Atkins, whom Trump tapped to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The U.S. has compiled some $5 billion worth of seized bitcoin, according to Forbes, but some crypto advocates want to see a more intentional effort to build a strategic reserve of the digital assets.