Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman released updated text for a crypto market structure bill on January 21 and set a committee mark for January 27.
The bill, titled the ‘Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act’, would give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) a defined framework to oversee portions of the spot crypto market as operations pass through brokers, dealers, exchanges and custodians.
The bill is the AC’s attempt to formalize what happens when something goes wrong. Crypto’s biggest pain points in retail often emerge as operational failures: account freezes, delayed withdrawals, outages during volatility, unclear complaint processes, and disputes over how platforms handle liquidations or restricting access.
Boozman’s text attempts to turn these recurring issues into a regulatory feedback loop, while answering the question lawmakers continue to circle: whether the CFTC can afford and staff the job.
A watchdog with a mandate to convert disruptions into rule changes
One of the bill’s clearest provisions affecting retail is found in Section 211, which establishes an “Office of the Digital Commodity Retail Advocate” within the CFTC. The text also defines who qualifies as a retail participant: someone who is not an eligible contract participant, who operates in a spot or cash digital commodity market, and who has completed a digital commodity transaction with an individual or entity registered with the CFTC.
The Retail Attorney reports directly to the CFTC Chairman and is appointed from individuals with experience representing retail participants.
In contrast to many proposals for market structures that are limited to broad mandates, this agency comes up with a list of tasks that maps out how damage to retail often occurs in practice.
The advocate would help retail participants resolve “significant issues” with the CFTC or with a registered futures association, identify areas where retail participants could benefit from regulatory or rule updates, and identify issues retail users face at CFTC-registered companies.
The agency is also tasked with analyzing how proposed CFTC rules and registered futures associations could affect private participants, and then recommending changes to both the Commission and Congress.
The practical value the bill would provide is not a new office that will magically stop freezes or outages, but the statute that creates an internal unit with instructions to gather evidence, look for patterns, and force those patterns into the regulatory process.
If a recurring failure occurs at multiple registered locations, the attorney’s job is to translate this into regulatory changes, rather than leaving it as background noise.
The bill also sets confidentiality limits that work both ways. The attorney may access CFTC and registered futures association documents as necessary, but nothing in the text authorizes the attorney or staff to access or disclose proprietary or sensitive market data, either publicly or within the Commission.
The agency must report to Congress twice a year, with a goals report due by June 30 and an activities report due by December 31. If funded and staffed, these reports could become an ongoing scoreboard on which retail issues continue to surface among registered companies and what the CFTC does in response.
Boozman’s text also confronts the capacity criticism head-on, and does so with figures. It directs the CFTC to assess and collect fees from registered digital commodity brokers, dealers, exchanges, and qualified digital asset custodians, and to deposit those funds as compensatory collections into the CFTC’s credit account.
The Commission would establish reimbursement rates intended to correspond to annual appropriations for the covered activities, and the bill provides that reimbursement rates are not subject to judicial review. To close the gap before that fee system is in place, the bill authorizes an upfront appropriation of $150,000,000 “which will remain available until exhausted” until the Commission establishes and begins collecting registration fees.
It also gives the CFTC chairman the authority to appoint individuals with “specialized knowledge” of the crypto industry without the usual competitive restrictions.
That language does real work: Oversight of spot crypto would depend on understanding how market operations, custodial plumbing, and risk controls behave when venues are under pressure.
The execution risk here is simple. Even with money, surveillance requires monitoring, investigative capacity and operational preparedness when a site is rapidly changing behavior.
A compensation model can fund the workforce, but it must survive the political process, and a severance package still depends on whether the agency moves quickly enough to build a team that can keep pace with the market structure that changes in days, not years.
The Fi line in the sand: who can get funding and who can pull the lever
Retail users are not the only ones who should be concerned about the new bill. It could also disproportionately impact builders and protocols, as it draws the DeFi line almost entirely through definitions rather than blanket exceptions.
The text separates software that simply conveys user instructions from systems where an individual or coordinated group has meaningful influence over custody, execution, or rules.
A “decentralized financial messaging system” is defined as software that allows a user to create or submit an instruction to a DeFi trading protocol, combined with an exclusion that functions as a test of control: the system cannot give anyone other than the user control over user funds or the authority to execute the user’s trades.
In plain terms, the statute pushes projects toward two questions: can someone else get the funds, and can someone else pull the implementation lever?
The definition of a DeFi trading protocol follows the same logic. It is a blockchain-based system that carries out transactions according to predetermined automated rules, without relying on any person other than the user to maintain custody or control of the assets involved.
The bill then narrows that scope through exclusions that bring a protocol back within the scope of regulation if an individual or coordinated group can control or materially change functionality or rules, if operations are not based solely on transparent, pre-established code, or if a group has unilateral authority to restrict or censor access.
That framework shifts compliance conversations from marketing labels to operational facts: administrator keys, upgrade authority, board concentration and access controls.
It also sets up a future enforcement record documenting who had the power to change the system, who could stop users from using it and who could, in practice, move transactions from automatic to authorized.
The Senate Agriculture crypto bill attempts two constructs at once: a CFTC-centered regime for spot activities routed through intermediaries, and an internal structure intended to keep retail failures on the agenda through mandatory reporting and rule review.
Whether it becomes more than a paper framework will depend on capacity and political alignment as the committee approaches the Jan. 27 markup and the parallel track of the Senate benches continues to drift toward late February or March.