Futures commission merchants (FCMs) and derivatives clearing organizations (DCOs) hold trillions of dollars in customer segregated funds — the collateral that underpins derivatives markets. Until September 2026, the question of whether those funds could be invested in tokenized assets was legally ambiguous: the CFTC's regulations specified the permitted asset classes but had not addressed whether a tokenized version of a permitted asset qualified.
The CFTC's September guidance ends that ambiguity with a two-part test: same rights, same treatment. If a tokenized asset conveys the same economic and legal rights as the traditional equivalent the regulations already permit, and if the tokenized version is subject to equivalent regulatory controls, it qualifies. If it does not meet both conditions, it does not.
What the "Same Rights" Test Requires
The test is functional, not formal. A tokenized Treasury bill qualifies not because it is labeled "tokenized Treasury" but because it gives the holder the same rights as a traditional Treasury bill: the same maturity date, the same interest payment, the same priority in the issuer's capital structure, the same redemption mechanism, and the same legal claim against the US government in the event of non-payment. The token is a delivery mechanism; the rights it conveys must be identical to the traditional instrument's rights.
This has immediate practical implications for the major tokenized Treasury products. BlackRock's BUIDL fund holds Treasury bills through BNY Mellon as custodian. Holders of BUIDL tokens have a fractional interest in the fund, not a direct claim on the Treasury bills. The question is whether that indirect claim — through a fund structure rather than direct ownership — conveys the "same rights" as direct Treasury bill ownership for CFTC segregated fund purposes. The guidance addresses this by focusing on economic equivalence and investor protection rather than legal form: if the fund structure preserves all the economic rights of direct Treasury ownership and adds no material additional counterparty risk, it likely qualifies. Specific products require specific legal analysis.
The Public Blockchain Recordkeeping Question
The CFTC guidance also addresses a specific concern that derivatives firms had raised about using public blockchain records as official books and records. Public blockchains are permissionless — any address can transact and any observer can read the ledger. FCMs that hold customer assets are subject to strict confidentiality requirements; the idea of customer position information being publicly visible on a blockchain creates regulatory tension.
The guidance resolves this with a distinction between settlement records (the blockchain record of who holds a token) and customer position information (which customer of an FCM holds what). Settlement records on a public blockchain can be FCM-compliant if: the FCM maintains a private mapping between token addresses and customer identities that is not published on-chain, the blockchain address itself is not identifiable to a specific customer without the private mapping, and the FCM's compliance systems can produce the customer-identified records on regulatory demand.
In practice, this means FCMs that use public blockchains for settlement must maintain an off-chain identity layer — which is how most institutional tokenization platforms already operate (Securitize's allowlist, for example, maps wallet addresses to verified investor identities in a private database while the token transfers themselves are visible on Ethereum).
Which Products Clear the Bar
Likely qualify: Tokenized Treasury bills and Treasury-backed money market funds from issuers with regulated custodians and clear redemption rights — BUIDL (subject to fund structure analysis), BENJI, USDY, and similar products from licensed issuers with institutional custody arrangements.
| Product Type | Example | CFTC Customer Funds | Key Condition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tokenized T-bills — licensed issuer | BUIDL, BENJI, USDY | ✅ Likely qualify | Same rights analysis required per product |
| Tokenized money market funds | Tokenized USDC MMF | ✅ Likely qualify | If underlying is already CFTC-permitted |
| Tokenized private credit | Maple Finance tokens | ⚠️ Analysis required | Not traditional CFTC-permitted asset |
| Tokenized equities | TSV stock tokens | ⚠️ Analysis required | Not traditionally a segregated fund asset |
| Offshore synthetic tokens | Robinhood Jersey tokens | ❌ Likely excluded | No equivalent traditional permitted asset |
| Algo / crypto-collateralized | Algorithmic stablecoins | ❌ Excluded | No reserve backing; not permitted |
Analysis required: Tokenized private credit products, tokenized equity, and any product where the underlying asset is not itself a CFTC-permitted segregated fund investment.
Likely do not qualify: Offshore price exposure instruments (Robinhood's Jersey-issued tokens), synthetic crypto-collateralized stablecoins, and any product without an equivalent traditional asset that is already permitted.
The practical result: the pool of assets eligible for CFTC customer segregated funds just expanded to include high-quality tokenized traditional assets. For the firms managing those assets — futures brokers, clearinghouses, swap dealers — this is a meaningful change that makes yield-generating tokenized products available for assets that previously sat in zero-yield cash or very short-term Treasuries.
→ The full post-CLARITY regulatory stack
→ What You Actually Own — the rights test applied to tokenized equity
→ The yield gap — why this matters for CFTC-regulated firms holding cash