CFTC Sets Crypto Agenda, Banking Lobby Eyes OCC Lawsuit and Brazil Resists Stablecoin Tax
Three Jurisdictions, Three Pressure Points
Crypto regulation advanced on three distinct fronts on March 10, 2026, as the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission outlined an ambitious rulemaking agenda, Wall Street trade groups weighed legal action against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Brazilian legislators prepared to block a proposed executive tax on stablecoin transactions. Each development reflects a broader structural tension between incumbent financial institutions and the expanding perimeter of digital asset activity, and none of them is likely to resolve quickly.
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Dogecoin DOGE$0.1023▲1.42%Selig Sets Out the CFTC’s Digital Asset Priorities
Speaking at the FIA Global Cleared Markets Conference in Boca Raton, Florida, CFTC Chair Michael Selig described what he characterised as a transformative moment for American financial markets. He confirmed that the agency is actively drafting an asset taxonomy to clarify which digital assets fall under its commodity jurisdiction, alongside guidance for decentralised finance developers and rules governing leveraged crypto trading. Selig also gave his clearest endorsement yet of blockchain-based prediction markets, calling well-functioning event contract platforms “truth machines” on the grounds that capital-backed forecasts create accountability and generate information signals that are increasingly viewed as more reliable than conventional opinion polling.
The practical implications of that position matter beyond rhetoric. Several US states are pursuing legal challenges against prediction market operators, and the CFTC’s supportive stance creates a federal counterweight to those efforts. The agency’s simultaneous work on DeFi guidance is equally consequential; developers have operated in a prolonged period of regulatory ambiguity, and even preliminary guidance on liability standards and protocol classification could reshape where infrastructure is built and who builds it. Selig’s remark that “America is now the crypto capital of the world” should be read less as triumphalism than as a policy signal that the CFTC intends to anchor that position through structured rules rather than enforcement-led deterrence.
These efforts sit within a larger 2026 legislative environment. The GENIUS Act, enacted in July 2025, introduced federal stablecoin licensing with mandatory one-to-one fiat reserve backing under Treasury oversight effective January 2026. The Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act remains pending, but it is that legislation which would formally resolve the long-standing jurisdictional boundary between the SEC and the CFTC, the resolution that practitioners across the industry have been waiting for since at least 2021.
Banking Lobby Considers Legal Challenge to OCC Charters
While the CFTC builds forward, a different kind of institutional resistance is taking shape elsewhere in Washington. The Bank Policy Institute, a trade group whose membership includes some of the largest commercial banks in the United States, is reportedly weighing a lawsuit against the OCC over its decision to grant conditional national trust bank charters to crypto firms. The OCC issued conditional approvals in December 2025 to BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Ripple and Paxos; further applications have followed since, with firms such as Zerohash among those joining the OCC application wave in early March.
The BPI’s core argument, according to a source cited by The Guardian who is familiar with the lobby’s thinking, is that granting federally recognised charter status to crypto-native firms poses systemic risks to both consumers and the broader financial system. The legal theory appears to centre on whether the OCC has reinterpreted its federal licensing authority in ways that exceed the agency’s statutory mandate. This is not the first time incumbent banks have turned to litigation to resist a structural shift in access to the federal financial infrastructure; a comparable dynamic played out when non-bank fintech firms sought OCC special-purpose charters beginning in 2018, resulting in years of court battles that produced mixed outcomes for the challengers.
The stakes are substantial. A national trust bank charter confers deposit-taking and custody capabilities under federal rather than state-by-state licensing, reducing compliance friction considerably for firms operating at scale. That is precisely what traditional banks find threatening; it narrows a structural moat that has historically required years and significant capital to construct. The tension is further illustrated by the industry backlash that followed Kraken’s receipt of a Federal Reserve master account, which was the first such approval granted to a crypto-native firm in US history.
Brazil’s Congress Prepares to Block a 3.5% Stablecoin Levy
In Brazil, the conflict is between the executive and legislative branches rather than between incumbents and new entrants. The country’s Congressional crypto faction is preparing draft legislation to pre-empt or reverse a proposed executive decree that would impose a 3.5% tax on stablecoin transactions. The Parliamentary Front for the Free Market, the grouping coordinating the response, argues that such a measure would constitute executive overreach, given that tax policy of this nature requires legislative authorisation under Brazilian constitutional law.
The economic logic driving the proposed levy is not difficult to trace. Brazilian capital outflows into dollar-denominated stablecoins have grown materially over the past two years, partly as a hedge against domestic currency depreciation; the real lost approximately 20% of its value against the US dollar across 2024 and 2025. A transaction tax at 3.5% would substantially increase the friction cost of using stablecoins as a dollar-access mechanism, which is likely the intended effect from the executive’s perspective. Critics counter that such friction would push activity offshore or into less regulated venues rather than reducing it, a dynamic documented in several other jurisdictions that have attempted to tax crypto transactions without accompanying structural alternatives.
The Congressional response reflects a pattern visible across multiple emerging markets: retail adoption of dollar stablecoins has outpaced the institutional appetite for managing the monetary policy consequences, and governments are now attempting to reassert control through fiscal instruments. Whether Brazil’s legislature succeeds in blocking the decree will depend partly on coalition arithmetic and partly on how quickly the executive moves to formalise the proposal before any bill reaches a vote.
A Coherent Pattern Across Divergent Jurisdictions
Taken together, March 10 offered a reasonably clear illustration of where structural friction concentrates as digital asset markets mature. Regulatory agencies with proactive mandates, such as the CFTC under Selig, are gaining the capacity to write rules rather than simply enforce them; incumbents with existing capital and political leverage are deploying litigation as a competitive tool; and sovereign governments are discovering that monetary substitution via stablecoins is harder to suppress through taxation than through institutional design. All three dynamics will continue to evolve well beyond the current quarter, and the interactions between them are likely to prove more consequential than any single ruling or policy announcement viewed in isolation.
