CFTC's Selig: The end of inter-agency friction
What the SEC-CFTC "Project Crypto" truce means for tokenized securities
Following years of Chokepoint 2.0 and the generally crypto-unfriendly Gensler era at the SEC, the unresolved question of how the SEC and CFTC divide jurisdiction over crypto assets has been one of the more corrosive problems in the space. On January 29, 2026, SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Brian Selig held a joint "Project Crypto" event and announced that both agencies are working toward a shared taxonomy: digital securities under the SEC, digital commodities under the CFTC, with a defined process for sorting out whatever falls in between. A&O Shearman has a useful breakdown of what both chairs actually said.
Anyone who's tried to issue or trade tokenized assets has run into this problem firsthand. The "is this a security or a commodity?" question was never academic; it determined which regulatory regime applied, what compliance infrastructure you needed, and which agency you had to satisfy first. The two agencies didn't coordinate well on the boundary cases for years, and that grey zone was expensive in both time and money.
The framing coming out of Project Crypto is "minimum effective dose" regulation, phased rollout, no piling new rules on top of old ones. Both chairs came back repeatedly to competitiveness as a motivation, keeping this market onshore rather than watching it develop in other jurisdictions. On March 10, Selig told the FIA conference that the inter-agency friction is behind them (see CoinDesk) and added that the CFTC is expanding the types of tokenized collateral eligible for margin and clearing purposes. That's a concrete operational change to market infrastructure, not a restatement of intent.
On the legislative side, the CLARITY Act is working its way through Congress with the goal of codifying these jurisdictional lines. If it passes, the taxonomy stops being agency guidance and becomes law.
The day before the Project Crypto event, on January 28, the SEC released its Statement on Tokenized Securities (which I covered in detail here), outlining 5 distinct models for how a security can exist on-chain within the current regulatory framework. The models range from a traditional book-entry security with a blockchain layer attached all the way to fully on-chain issuance, and each maps to a specific place in the SEC's existing rules. Chair Atkins' ETHDenver remarks (covered here) and Commissioner Uyeda's related statements (covered here) fill in useful context on the direction this is all heading.
For issuers, having 5 defined models means the compliance question now has more than one answer. The right model depends on your structure, your investors, and how you want the asset to function on-chain. Vertalo has been an SEC-registered transfer agent since 2019 and has worked with over 100 issuers and 100,000 investors across this space. We've worked through all 5 models in detail. If you're sorting out which approach fits your situation, we're glad to talk it through.