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David assists clients with a variety of transactional needs, including mergers and acquisitions and other general corporate matters. He focuses his practice on structured finance and securitization matters. David represents the corporate trust departments of financial institutions in their capacities as corporate trustee, collateral administrator, collateral agent, paying agent, custodian, securities intermediary, and other service provider capacities. He has representative experience in collateralized loan obligation transactions, warehouse facilities, and loan financing transactions.

On May 29, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission) took a set of actions that together open a path for digital asset perpetual contracts to trade on registered U.S. platforms by classifying them as futures, rather than swaps, for the first time. The Commission approved the first such product, issued a policy statement on how it will review future perpetual contracts, and its staff issued separate guidance addressing foreign-listed perpetuals and customer margin and 24/7 trading. Perpetual contracts, often called perpetual futures, are futures-style instruments without a fixed expiration date, and they have until now traded almost entirely on offshore crypto trading platforms.

On May 22, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Board of Directors approved a notice of proposed rulemaking to extend Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and sanctions compliance standards to the permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) it supervises under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (the GENIUS Act).  These GENIUS Act BSA and sanctions compliance rules for PPSIs were recently proposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as we discussed in a prior advisory.

On April 7, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Board approved its second notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) implementing the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act). This second set of FDIC proposed regulations would establish prudential standards for FDIC-supervised permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) and FDIC-supervised stablecoin custodians, and it would update the capital and deposit insurance frameworks for the bank parents of those issuers and for stablecoin reserves and tokenized deposits.

On Thursday, May 14, at 10:30 a.m., the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee will meet in executive session to mark up H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (the CLARITY Act). The session is a key procedural step for this comprehensive digital asset market structure legislation that, if enacted, would create a new federal framework for how crypto markets are regulated, supervised, and policed for fraud, illicit finance, and other purposes.

On April 10, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) jointly issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) setting out their view of how sanctions, anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance requirements should apply to permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. The agencies also issued an accompanying fact sheet.

On February 25, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a 376‑page notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to implement the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act for entities under its jurisdiction. The proposed rule would create a comprehensive framework for “payment stablecoin” issuers supervised by the OCC, foreign payment stablecoin issuers accessing the U.S. market, and certain custody activities by OCC‑regulated banks. The NPRM was published in the Federal Register on March 2, with the 60-day comment period ending on May 1, 2026. The NPRM also poses more than 200 specific questions for public comment on definitions, activities, reserves, liquidity, and other key design choices.

On January 29, the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (AG Committee), led by Chairman John Boozman (R‑AR), advanced S. 3755, the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act (DCIA), on a party-line vote. The DCIA builds on the bipartisan, House-passed CLARITY Act to create a federal registration and compliance regime for key digital asset intermediaries. The DCIA also would provide a clear legal definition of “digital commodities” and establish a spot market digital commodity intermediary regulatory regime with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In the press release, Chairman Boozman framed the vote as “a critical step toward creating clear rules for digital asset markets” that protect consumers while allowing innovation to thrive.

In 2025, the U.S. digital asset landscape evolved more dramatically than in any year since the industry’s inception. A pro‑innovation White House, an active Congress, and key regulators — including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Department of

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at clarifying the permissible activities of national trust banks. The proposal seeks to amend chartering regulations to explicitly state that national trust companies may engage in nonfiduciary activities, such as asset custody, without being required to obtain a full-service national bank charter. However, the proposed rule does not address what specific nonfiduciary activities are permissible, nor does it indicate whether a national trust company must engage in a minimum level of fiduciary activities.