CFTC Chair Selig: No Race to the Bottom on Crypto Leverage

Selig's framing matters less for what it promises than for what it rejects: treating crypto leverage as a separate regulatory category with its own looser standards. The signal is that the CFTC intends to fold leveraged crypto into the existing derivatives playbook rather than compete with other jurisdictions on permissiveness, which puts the agency's posture closer to prudential supervision than to the innovation-chasing stance some in the industry have sought. The open question is how those legacy margin models — built for assets with established liquidity and price histories — translate to crypto markets with different volatility and settlement profiles, and whether that translation happens through formal rulemaking or case-by-case enforcement.