The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is the US federal agency that regulates derivatives markets — futures, options and swaps. Congress created it as an independent agency in 1974, moving futures oversight out of the Department of Agriculture as contracts spread from farm goods into financial products. Its governing statute is the Commodity Exchange Act.
What it actually supervises
The CFTC's remit is the contract, not the underlying asset. It registers and oversees the venues and intermediaries that carry those contracts — designated contract markets, clearing organisations, brokers — and polices fraud and manipulation in the markets they run. In the United States, Bitcoin and Ether have been treated as commodities for these purposes, which is why US-regulated Bitcoin futures sit with the CFTC while the question of whether a token is a security sits with the SEC.
A worked example: a perpetual futures contract on an offshore venue is plainly a derivative, but the offshore venue is not a registered US one. US-facing versions therefore tend to appear as registered-venue or permissioned products rather than as the offshore original — which is why so much crypto product news is really venue-registration news.
The boundary problem
Spot markets are the gap. The CFTC's anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority reaches spot commodity markets after the fact, but it operates no general licensing regime for spot crypto exchanges, and the SEC's authority reaches only securities. Legislation such as the proposed CLARITY Act was drafted to close that seam by assigning market-structure oversight between the two agencies.
How MoonWire uses the term
We name the CFTC where a filing, registration or action in our coverage actually turns on derivatives jurisdiction — for instance the prediction-market venues' jurisdiction fight, in this regulator tracker, and the day the Senate deferred the market-structure bill, in this breaking brief. The crypto regulation hub collects the rest.
What it is not
The CFTC does not approve tokens, endorse venues or vouch for returns. "CFTC-regulated" describes a contract and the venue that lists it, not the prospects of the asset underneath.