The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Acting Chairman Caroline D. Pham has announced the rollout of a digital assets pilot programme for BTC, ETH, and USDC.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) intends to use this programme as collateral in derivatives markets, guide tokenized collateral, and withdraw outdated requirements following the enactment of the GENIUS Act.
This comes as a key milestone in the adoption of digital assets in regulated markets with proper guardrails and follows the tokenized collateral initiative Acting Chairman Pham introduced in September 2025 as part of the commission’s Crypto Sprint to implement recommendations in President Donald Trump’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets report.
All actions taken by the CFTC are based on stakeholder input and public comments, feedback from a CFTC Crypto CEO Forum, and recommendations from the Digital Asset Markets Subcommittee of the Global Markets Advisory Committee, which Acting Chairman Pham currently supports.
Using tokenized assets as collateral in trading
The CFTC’s Market Participants Division, Division of Market Oversight, and Division of Clearing and Risk provided new guidance on how to leverage tokenized assets as collateral in the trading of futures and swaps. As part of this, the organisation emphasised that its regulations are technology-neutral, encouraging the analysis of tokenized assets on an individual basis according to its existing framework and companies’ policies and procedures.
The guidance concerns tokenized real-world assets, including US Treasury securities and money market funds. Among the covered topics, the CFTC mentions eligible tokenized assets, legal enforceability, segregation, custody and control arrangements, haircuts and valuation, and operational risk.
Additionally, the MPD issued a no-action position concerning certain requirements applicable to Futures Commission Merchants (FCMs) that accept non-securities digital assets, including payment stablecoins, as customer margin collateral or hold specific proprietary payment stablecoins in segregated customer accounts. This offers market participants more regulatory clarity about the application of the segregation and capital requirements to FCMs that accept these digital assets as margin collateral. Also, they emphasise the importance of FCMs keeping optimal risk management procedures.
