One of the U.S. agencies trying to bolster oversight of cryptocurrency trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), is looking toward a big year of crypto enforcement actions, according to Chairman Rostin Behnam.

His agency is “working towards another strong year of precedent-setting cases,” Behnam said in remarks prepared for delivery Friday at an American Bar Association event. He said budget increases at the CFTC will help support “growing our enforcement and surveillance teams.”

“The CFTC has brought important, precedent-setting cases against those who illegally offer derivatives or leveraged, margined or financed digital asset products to US customers or operate within the United States,” he said He promised to use “the full breadth of the commission’s authority” in going after illegal transactions in digital assets.

Already, he said, 20% of the agency’s enforcement cases last year involved digital assets, showing its outsized interest in a sector that represents a tiny sliver of the markets the CFTC oversees.

On that note, Behnam continued his argument that the CFTC should be given authority by Congress to directly oversee trading in tokens that aren’t securities. He said he’ll continue to speak with members of Congress, which started a new session last month, on writing legislation to make that happen.

Regulations CFTC Rostin Behnam Enforcement US Congress

Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.