Agencies Expected to Lead US Crypto Rulemaking After Midterms
As Americans head to the polls in the 2025 midterm elections, the question of who will hold the reins of digital-asset policy in Washington is drawing attention from industry legal professionals. Maylea Ma, deputy general counsel at the decentralized exchange protocol 1inch, told Cointelegraph that she anticipates federal regulatory bodies — specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Treasury Department — will be the primary force shaping crypto rules in the years ahead, irrespective of which party ends up controlling the House and Senate.
Ma acknowledged that the election results could alter the trajectory of the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that has been languishing in the Senate. Nevertheless, she stressed that the substantive regulatory progress the industry has been waiting for is more likely to emerge from agency-level action than from new legislation. In her view, the SEC, CFTC, and Treasury have been ramping up their outreach to crypto projects, signaling a willingness to engage directly with the sector.
That said, Ma cautioned that agency-level engagement, while welcome, does not deliver the kind of durable legal framework the industry has long sought. "The long-term goal, of course, remains a statute that cannot be reversed every time a government changes," she noted, underscoring that guidance issued by a single administration can be walked back by its successor.
Institutional Capital Still on the Sidelines
The lack of a permanent legislative foundation is not merely a political concern; it has real financial consequences. Michael Ho, co-founder of D3 — the team developing Doma Protocol — told Cointelegraph that the stalled market-structure bill leaves US crypto policy resting on agency guidance that a future administration could simply undo. "That keeps serious capital waiting," Ho said, pointing to institutional investors who are reluctant to commit to tokenized real-world-asset products when the regulatory ground beneath them can shift with a change in leadership.
Ho argued that the only way to unlock the next wave of institutional participation is to embed clear, binding rules into statute. "Whatever the result, clear rules written into law are what will bring institutional capital into tokenized real-world assets," he stated, framing the issue as one of legal permanence rather than political alignment.
Recent Moves by the SEC and CFTC
The agency-driven approach Ma describes has already produced concrete steps. In August, the SEC put forward a proposed framework governing crypto fundraising. The proposal would introduce exemptions for certain token offerings and establish a safe harbor that would shield qualifying tokens from being classified as investment contracts under federal securities law — a distinction that has long created legal ambiguity for issuers.
The following month, in September, the SEC further updated its staff guidance to address token buybacks, the treatment of crypto networks, and staking receipt tokens, narrowing the scope of how the agency applies existing securities principles to digital-asset activities.
On the commodities side, the CFTC submitted its own crypto market regulatory plan for White House review on September 17. The timing was notable: the filing came just two days after the Senate voted down the CLARITY Act, effectively confirming that the legislative path to a comprehensive market-structure law remains blocked for the time being.
Taken together, these developments illustrate a regulatory landscape in which agencies are filling the void left by Congress. For industry participants like 1inch and Doma Protocol, that reality carries both opportunities and risks — faster rulemaking on one hand, but the ever-present threat that today's safe harbors could become tomorrow's enforcement actions under a different administration.