Former Acting Chair Caroline Pham says CFTC can regulate almost everything except 'onions and box office receipts'

Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Acting Chair Caroline Pham said the Commodity Exchange Act already gives the agency jurisdiction over nearly everything except onions and movie box office receipts.

"There is very little that the CFTC's jurisdiction doesn't touch because the way that the Commodity Exchange Act is drafted, pretty much everything is a commodity except for onions and movie box office receipts," Pham, now chief legal officer and chief administrative officer at MoonPay, told The Block in an interview at Token2049 Singapore.

Following the failure of the Clarity Act last month, many industry figures have shifted their focus to agency rulemaking, though some continue to push for formal legislation. Pham said the CFTC's regulatory framework is sufficient, as it was designed to be principles-based and flexible enough to cover new types of commodities, citing AI compute as an example.

"Now people are looking at having AI compute markets and being able to put derivatives on AI compute," Pham said. "This is exactly what the CFTC's regulatory framework was designed to anticipate."

The CFTC, under Chairman Michael Selig, has been actively issuing proposed rulemakings for the crypto sector, most recently an advanced notice on Regulation CAM and Regulation CTX. The agency said it would create a federal framework for leveraged retail crypto transactions as an alternative to state licenses. 

Pham said this recent proposal is a continuation of the CFTC Crypto Sprint initiative that she launched in 2025, which authorized the first-ever trading of spot crypto on CFTC-registered exchanges. That effort relied on a 2010 Dodd-Frank provision that required leveraged, margined, or financed retail commodity transactions to occur on a regulated exchange — a requirement the CFTC did not enforce for years.

"That's absolutely the kind of protection that we should have for retail traders in crypto in the United States," Pham added. "Much better to put it on a strongly regulated exchange than to leave it kind of out there for a patchwork of different laws."

Stablecoins v. tokenized deposits

Pham also said the industry is overestimating the role of stablecoins relative to tokenized deposits in wholesale markets, stating that atomic settlement of a single trading day would require roughly $15 trillion in cash that does not exist.

"If you were to actually calculate all of the cash that would be required in a trading day using atomically settled, real-time settlement on blockchain, it would be $15 trillion," she said. "There is not $15 trillion that can change hands in one day."

She said banks currently manage the volume through net settlement, in which counterparties offset obligations and exchange only the residual amounts. That's where tokenized deposits, she said, will be "absolutely necessary."

Stablecoins, on the other hand, are more useful where counterparties do not know or trust each other, or where the goal is to eliminate settlement risk by delivering the asset and the cash simultaneously, Pham said. 

'Real' tokenized stocks in two years

On tokenized equities, Pham said she expects the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to list tokenized shares of companies and start seeing "real" trading activity and volume within the next two years.

"The [SEC's] innovation exemption is very clearly about creating a regulated pathway for real stocks, like stocks that are listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq, to be able to be listed on these tokenized securities venues within an SEC regulatory framework," Pham said. She also pointed to Nasdaq's Payward partnership and NYSE parent ICE's OKX partnership as clear examples of TradFi's convergence with crypto native technology.

She distinguished those instruments from synthetic tokens that issuers have not approved, citing public comments from AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron.

"Real securities involve voting rights, and you're a shareholder in the company you have governance over," she said. "That's why you have a shareholder annual meeting. Everybody loves to go to Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, because you actually own part of the place."

Pham also said she expects a second wave of NFTs once regulatory clarity improves, but framed them as tools for customer engagement rather than securities. She compared NFTs to existing loyalty programs such as Starbucks points or airline miles, saying prior U.S. enforcement in the last administration had chilled activity that was not equivalent to equity ownership.