Michael Selig is two-and-a-half months into leading the independent federal agency that regulates the U.S. derivatives markets, including futures, options, and swaps.
Selig was sworn in as the latest chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Dec. 22, 2025, a couple of months after being nominated by President Donald Trump and then confirmed by the Senate. Now at the helm of the 52-year-old agency, Selig’s policy agenda includes deciding how aggressively to regulate prediction markets and whether cryptocurrency should be treated as a legitimate financial instrument.
Selig, 37, is a lawyer by trade. He’s an alum of George Washington University Law School and spent his undergraduate years at Florida State University.
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The Washington Examiner sat down with Selig for an interview at the CFTC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The new chairman outlined his vision for the future of an agency that has been thrust into a new technological era, one in which not only cryptocurrency and prediction markets proliferate but also artificial intelligence is increasingly part of everyday life.
Selig said he wants to see the CFTC be a regulator for “all sorts of interesting products.”
He added, “Under my leadership, I really want to lean into that.”
Before taking the mantle at the CFTC, Selig was the chief counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force and was a senior adviser to Trump’s SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. So, Selig came into his current role with a background in emerging technologies within the CFTC’s regulatory sphere and in examining how best to approach them.
Before his time at the SEC, Selig was a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, an international law firm, where he worked on derivatives and securities regulatory matters.
The SEC is often more prominent than the CFTC as a regulator, and there are key differences. The SEC is tasked with regulating stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and other financial instruments, while the CFTC regulates contracts tied to future commodity prices, such as wheat contracts or oil futures, including options and swaps.
Agency transparency
First and foremost, Selig said, he wants to ensure there are clear rules of the road at the CFTC so that people know where things stand with the regulator. When Selig was in private practice, he said he saw his clients would suffer from a lack of clear guidelines and from policies that were more staff guidance than hard-and-fast procedures.
“Many of my clients were targeted by regulation by enforcement, by ‘debanking,’ by the kind of lack of policy where everything was just staff lore and staff guidance, and there was no concrete rules of the road,” Selig said.
Selig is no fan of Gary Gensler, who is best known as the SEC chairman during President Joe Biden’s administration. Gensler served as CFTC chairman for nearly five years during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Gensler “screwed things up” at the CFTC before moving to the SEC and doing the same, Selig said.
Notably, Gensler was seen as a boogeyman of sorts to many in the crypto world during the Biden administration, drawing accusations of being blatantly adversarial to digital assets. Selig and Atkins have charted an entirely different path with cryptocurrencies. The pair of financial regulators has worked to embrace the nascent asset class.
“Someone like that can just run roughshod over entire industries, and that’s exactly what we saw — we saw with crypto, we saw it with prediction markets, we saw with AI, and many other industries where there was just this political motivation to target market participants,” Selig said.
When it comes to some of that regulatory “staff lore,” Selig said he hopes to put more concrete guidelines and rules in place under his leadership. He said part of the impetus for doing that is that when the agency delegates to the staff, a new administration can undo much of the work.
“The other problem with it is that it’s not transparent,” the chairman said. “I think that you’ve got to put the rules in clear Federal Register typeface so that everybody can see them and it’s fair.”
The rise of prediction markets
One of the splashiest news items that Selig and the CFTC have been dealing with recently is the rise of prediction market platforms such as Kalshi. Kalshi, Polymarket, and other prediction markets offer event contracts that allow users to wager on outcomes, and the CFTC regulates such U.S. platforms.
The idea behind prediction markets is relatively simple: Users can buy shares in possible outcomes for various events. Using the example of the presidential race, one share on that market would represent a “yes” for Trump winning, and another a “no.” The price of a yes is $1 if Trump wins, but zero if he loses. If the price starts at $0.50, that implies that he has a 50% chance of winning. Any user who thought Trump’s odds were better than that could buy a yes contract. If Trump had then won, the user would have gotten $0.50 for every contract they bought at $0.50.
Selig said that he thinks prediction markets are a “really interesting technology.”
“Of course, it’s the early days, and we’re seeing all sorts of alleged insider trading and things like that, but that clears up once you get enforcement in place, once you get clear rules of the road,” he said. “But these new technologies, I think, are really essential for our society.”
Recently, several high-profile instances of suspected insider dealing have raised complaints from officials and legislators who say they are worried about traders being ripped off — or even about prediction markets creating incentives for insiders to change the course of events. A vivid example came with trading on the capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, though that happened on Polymarket, which has its main exchange operating internationally.
Prediction markets have waded into sports contracts, which some states assert are akin to gambling, and that state gaming laws, not the CFTC, have authority over them.
The CFTC recently waded into the battle, with Selig’s agency filing an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief in federal court emphasizing the commission’s federal role in regulating prediction markets.
Selig told the Washington Examiner that the fight is bigger than just sports contracts.
“A lot of the litigation, if not all of the litigation, is targeting event contracts or prediction markets writ large; the states are asserting themselves because they don’t like the fact that some of these markets are in their states as a result of our national market system,” Selig said.
Crypto
The rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has been huge for the CFTC, which is tasked with regulating many of those digital assets.
Selig spoke highly of crypto in a general sense. Selig has extensive experience with cryptocurrencies and crypto regulation, having served as chief counsel on the SEC’s Crypto Task Force and participating in the president’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets.
He also spoke out against the idea of crypto being a hedge against debanking.
The big banks have denied that they debank people or businesses based on political views. But Republicans have long raised concerns that financial institutions might be denying financial services to conservatives.
“Crypto really is a check on debanking and exclusion from the financial system,” Selig said. “It’s important that we have these alternative financial systems, that we have alternatives in our information, in our news media, as well as in our ability to be productive as individuals and as small businesses.”
Congress has been working on legislation that would better establish a regulatory framework for digital assets. Selig said that he and the CFTC have been engaged with key Capitol Hill committees on potential crypto legislation.
“We’ve been working through some wrinkles with the team, and the White House has really been excellent in trying to make sure that everybody’s at the table and can reach a consensus on this,” Selig said.
“It’s important to put things expressly in statute, and having a bill that clearly codifies and protects the crypto asset industry here in the U.S., I think it’s an important thing,” he added.
Coordination with the SEC
The CFTC under Selig has had more cooperation and collaboration with the SEC than in the past, the chairman said.
Part of that is owed to Selig and Atkins working together before the former was nominated to lead the CFTC. He described the present moment as a “historic Atkins-Selig era” where the two regulators are really “working in lockstep.”
“This is a huge priority for my agency as well as for the SEC; there’s so much that has been overlooked because the agencies are just fighting with one another,” Selig said.
Selig said that he and Atkins meet at least once per week.
“I think it’s certainly not the typical cadence for the agencies, and just for too long the agencies have fought over everything,” he said. “The problem is, you’ve got all of these products that have just failed because the agencies can’t work together.”
Innovation council
One initiative under Selig has been the launch of the CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee.
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The committee brings together representatives from the financial industry, academia, public interest groups, and more to provide advice and recommendations to the commission.
“For too long, governments have kind of been this top-down ivory tower world of we’re going to tell businesses what to do and what’s best for them,” Selig said. “We’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to work together with industry to understand what they’re doing in the markets, what they’re building as a business, and collaborate on what the best regulatory framework looks like.”
Zach Halaschak (@zhalaschak) is the economics reporter for the Washington Examiner.