In a television interview on November 19, 2019, CFTC Chairman Heath Tarbert discussed digital assets and the importance of U.S. leadership in this space. Notably, he stated:
“I want the United States to lead, particularly in the blockchain technology that underlies digital assets… [U]ltimately I could see it overtaking the internet or being effectively parallel to the internet in using a variety of different kinds of transactions, not just the financial system, but in other types of transactions as well… I think whoever ends up leading in this technology will end up writing the rules of the road for the rest of the world. My emphasis is on making sure that the United States is a leader.”
The entire interview is available here.
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On November 10, 2025, Chairman John Boozman (R-MT) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee released a discussion draft of legislation regulating crypto markets in the United States. The draft is similar in several ways to the Clarity Act, which the House of Representatives passed in July 2025.
On April 8, 2025, Acting CFTC Chairman Caroline D. Pham issued Release Number 9063-25 regarding the digital asset industry. The release favorably cites a recent DOJ memorandum on the digital asset industry, and it instructs the CFTC staff to comply with President Trump’s executive orders regarding digital assets enforcement priorities and charging considerations.
Following President Trump’s Executive Order on Digital Assets, which instructed agencies to streamline and rationalize regulation of the digital asset space in a way that is technology-neutral, federal agencies have been responding. Below we summarize recent activities by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
On January 8, 2024, the CFTC’s Technology Advisory Committee issued a detailed report on decentralized finance, or DeFi. The report, which was authored by the Subcommittee on Digital Assets and Blockchain Technology, notes that DeFi offers both promising opportunities and complex, significant risks to the US financial system, consumers and national security.
The Hunton Blockchain Blog features opinions and legal analysis as we follow the development and use of distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain.
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