'Pretty much everything is a commodity except for onions and movie box office receipts': former acting CFTC chair Caroline Pham on how far the agency's reach goes

Caroline Pham, who led the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as acting chair before leaving for MoonPay, says there is very little the agency's jurisdiction does not touch. "Pretty much everything is a commodity except for onions and movie box office receipts," she told The Block in an interview at the Token2049 conference in Singapore, published on Monday, October 12.

The timing matters. With the Clarity Act, the crypto market structure bill, having failed to advance in the Senate, much of the industry has turned its attention to what regulators can do, The Block reported. On October 5 the CFTC, now led by chairman Michael Selig, announced an early-stage notice on two sets of rules, Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM, covering crypto trades offered to retail customers with leverage, margin or financing.

Pham, now MoonPay's chief legal officer and chief administrative officer, said that work continues the Crypto Sprint initiative she started at the agency in 2025.

She also made two forecasts. She expects the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to list tokenized shares and see real volume within two years. And she argued that settling a day's trades one by one, with no netting, would take about $15 trillion in cash, which is why she sees tokenized bank deposits as necessary for wholesale markets.

Pham now speaks as an executive at a crypto company, not as a regulator. The CFTC's notice is not yet a rule. Comments are due 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register.