President Donald Trump has chosen Michael Selig, a high ranking Securities and Exchange Commission official, to head up the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, White House crypto tsar David Sacks said in an X post on Saturday.
Selig has been working as chief counsel for the SEC’s crypto task force and as an advisor to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. The task force has been moving quickly to try to develop rules to make it easier for crypto companies to do business in the U.S., while the agency and administration as a whole has pulled back on investigations and dropped cases against crypto firms, which the Biden administration had accused of violating securities laws.
The CFTC will likely play an important role in regulating the crypto markets going forward. Congress is considering legislation that would make the agency the primary regulator for most crypto tokens.