White House Sends Four Crypto-Savvy Nominees to SEC and CFTC Seats

The White House rolled out four nominees for vacant commissioner seats at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — its first such picks in roughly a year. Nathan Anonick of Virginia and Matthew Rowland of the District of Columbia are up for the CFTC. Kristin N. Johnson of Michigan and Steven Levine of Maryland are headed for the SEC.

The slate is bipartisan: Anonick and Levine are Republicans, Johnson and Rowland are Democrats. The Senate Agriculture Committee gets first look at the CFTC pair, while the SEC picks go through the Senate Banking Committee.

Anonick is legislative counsel to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman and served as a lead negotiator on the committee's chunk of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Rowland, a CFTC attorney detailed to the Agriculture Committee, also worked on the Clarity Act and the committee's 2024 crypto bill.

Johnson knows the crypto beat from the inside — she's a former CFTC commissioner who focused on digital assets, risk management and market integrity, and she has spoken often about custody rules, DeFi and AI. Levine arrives from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he was general counsel and a senior advisor, after earlier stints at the SEC as counsel and deputy chief of staff to Commissioner Mark Uyeda.

Levine is nominated to succeed Hester Peirce, a loud crypto advocate who ran the agency's Crypto Task Force and helped Chairman Paul Atkins with Project Crypto, the push to refit securities regulation for digital assets and make the U.S. the quote-unquote crypto capital of the world.

Ji Kim, chief executive of the Crypto Council for Innovation, congratulated the nominees on X, writing that strong, bipartisan representation is essential to developing durable rules that safeguard markets, protect consumers, and support innovation. Kim added that both agencies will keep playing central and consequential roles in U.S. financial markets, and that the nominees' experience will help ensure continued American leadership.