Washington's crypto agencies write the rules Congress wouldn't: FinCEN kills the wallet and mixer proposals as the CFTC moves

On Monday, America's crypto regulators decided they had waited long enough for Congress. The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network withdrew two dormant crypto crackdowns, the commodities regulator opened rulemaking for leveraged crypto trading, and the crypto-ETF market kept moving without waiting for the securities regulator — a single day that laid out, in four acts, what the post-CLARITY fallback actually looks like.

The timing was deliberate on both ends of the week. OKXICE — the tokenized-securities joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and the NYSE's parent — filed with the SEC on Sunday, setting up Monday's agency blitz. And none of it required Congress, which is precisely the point.

The theme is no accident. Three weeks ago the CLARITY Act's market-structure bill failed to advance in the Senate, 49–50. Agency officials vowed at the time to keep writing crypto rules anyway. On Monday, they did — across three agencies and four announcements.

FinCEN walks away from the wallet and mixer rules

FinCEN, the Treasury bureau that polices money laundering, said it will take no further action on two proposals the crypto industry has been dreading for years. The first dates to December 23, 2020: a rule that would have required banks and money services businesses to verify customer identities and file reports on crypto transactions above $10,000 involving self-custodied — “unhosted” — wallets, and to keep records on those above $3,000.

The second is the October 2023 finding that international crypto mixing is “a class of transactions of primary money laundering concern” under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, along with the reporting rule proposed with it — institutions would have had to report mixing-linked transactions with details like wallet addresses, transaction hashes and IP addresses. Both notices were signed by FinCEN Deputy Director Jimmy L. Kirby; they were posted to the Federal Register's public inspection site Monday and are scheduled for formal publication Tuesday.

Neither proposal was ever finalized, so the withdrawals end the rulemakings rather than repealing anything in force — banks and exchanges face the same Bank Secrecy Act requirements they did on Friday. But the mixer withdrawal's rationale is notable: FinCEN said commenters warned the rule defined mixing so broadly it “could have a chilling effect on legitimate activity and place a large reporting burden on covered financial institutions,” and cited the White House's July 2025 crypto report, which backs the right of legitimate users to conduct private transactions on a public blockchain.

The CFTC's “crypto asset markets” end run

The day's constructive move came from the CFTC, which issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: two proposed rules, Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions (Regulation CTX) and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets (Regulation CAM), that would create a new category of CFTC-registered trading venues — “crypto asset markets” — for exchanges offering leveraged, margined or financed crypto trades to retail customers.

The pitch to exchanges is opt-in: one uniform federal regime instead of the patchwork of state money-transmitter licenses. Platforms in the new category would face anti-manipulation controls and a “proof of reserves” obligation, and customer trades would be intermediated through registered futures commission merchants. The agency is not stipulating specific leverage limits, but any exchange offering a leveraged product would have to clear it with CFTC staff.

“Today, the CFTC is doing its part to deliver clear rules of the road for crypto asset markets,” Selig said in remarks prepared for Fordham Law's annual Blockchain Regulatory Symposium — rules that would, he said, let crypto asset exchanges operate under the same statutory authorities the prior administration instead used to regulate by enforcement.

The limits of the maneuver are constitutional, not political. The CFTC is using its specific authority over margined or leveraged spot assets — it has no power to regulate plain spot crypto trading without Congress, and Selig said so himself: “We don't have the authority to impose such a requirement without congressional action.” Spot crypto remains governed by a patchwork of state and federal laws. The rules are now open for public comment.

The ETF queue the market stopped waiting for

The oddest corner of Monday's blitz is the corner the agencies barely touched. Canary Capital's spot Litecoin ETF, ticker LTCC, has already been trading — U.S. spot Litecoin ETF reserves hit a record 175,000 LTC on September 25, driven by a 39,000-LTC inflow into the Canary fund, which reached an all-time high fueled by institutional demand and speculative activity.

That is the quiet punchline to the SEC's endless ETF queue. The formal approval process — with its deadlines, delay notices and public-comment requests — is increasingly running behind products that reach investors anyway. Washington spent Monday arguing over who regulates crypto; the crypto market spent September rendering part of the argument moot.

OKX and the NYSE's parent want a 24/7 tokenized market

The weekend's most ambitious move came before Monday's announcements. OKXICE LLC — the 50-50 joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE's parent, formed in June — filed with the SEC on Sunday to launch a tokenized securities venue under the agency's new innovation exemption. The platform would offer around-the-clock trading in tokenized shares of 63 NYSE-listed companies, including Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Tesla, plus crypto-linked names like Strategy, Coinbase, Circle and BitGo.

The mechanics: permissioned Uniswap v4 liquidity pools running on XLayer, OKX's layer-2 network, with each tokenized stock paired against a stablecoin — USDC, USDG or USDT. Trading runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and each listed company would get 30 days to object or opt out before its shares go live. “A major step forward for OKXICE,” said co-chair Andrew Cuomo — the former New York governor — calling it progress “toward a truly global, 24/7 Wall Street.”

The timing is deliberate. The SEC unveiled its tokenized-stock innovation exemption last month, weeks after the CLARITY bill failed in the Senate. OKXICE is the first major test of whether that exemption can actually produce a functioning market — with the NYSE's own parent on the other side of the joint venture.

What the framework still can't touch

Put the pieces together and Monday reads as a coherent if lopsided picture: enforcement is loosening on old fights (FinCEN), leverage is getting a federal home (CFTC), the ETF queue is being bypassed by its own products (Litecoin), and the tokenization race is being run by the incumbents themselves (OKX×ICE). What's missing is the one thing only Congress can provide — a law covering plain spot trading — and nobody in Washington pretends otherwise.

Bitcoin barely moved on the news, holding near $86,000 on Monday after weaker U.S. payrolls data reduced the odds of an October Fed hike. Crypto policy, it turns out, has moved from the statute books to the rulemaking dockets — and the docket, unlike the Senate calendar, keeps filling up.