CFTC Opens U.S. Stock Market to Equity Perpetual Futures

Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Opens U.S. Stock Market to Equity Perpetual Futures

Perpetual futures on individual stocks can begin trading on U.S.-regulated exchanges for the first time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Tuesday, extending a product that was confined to offshore crypto venues a year ago into the equity market.

In a statement, CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said the contracts, which he called “Equity Perps,” were deemed approved under Commission Regulation 40.3 as security futures products. 

They may list on exchanges that hold a CFTC designated contract market registration and a notice registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a national securities exchange for security futures.

“This expansion marks a significant step towards allowing U.S. market participants, consistent with applicable law, to avail themselves of the advantages of perpetual futures,” Selig said. He said bringing the products inside the agency’s framework means Americans no longer need to “turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues.”

The contracts fall under the Commodity Exchange Act, federal securities law and the rulebooks of both agencies. The statement names no exchange, lists no contracts and sets no launch date. 

Those details are expected to come from the designated contract markets themselves.

Perpetual futures have no expiration date. Instead of settling on a fixed day, longs and shorts exchange periodic funding payments that keep the contract price tied to spot. The structure has dominated crypto derivatives for years, with most volume on platforms outside U.S. jurisdiction.

The CFTC approved the first U.S.-listed bitcoin perpetual, Kalshi’s BTCPERP, on May 29, and Kalshi went live with the product soon after. The same day, staff granted no-action relief that lets Coinbase Financial Markets route U.S. clients into offshore perp and options liquidity. Kalshi added gold and silver perpetuals in September. 

In his statement Tuesday, Selig described the equity contracts as an extension of that May decision “beyond digital commodities and into traditional securities.”

The legal basis is older. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 created a joint CFTC-SEC regime for security futures products, and the two agencies signed a memorandum of understanding on March 11 to coordinate rulemaking and enforcement. 

Selig cited both, and repeated SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins’s description of security futures as stranded in a regulatory “no man’s land” for lack of harmonization. The agencies had set out a joint crypto asset taxonomy earlier in the year.

Not everyone accepts the CFTC’s reading. CME Grou  sued the agency in June over the Kalshi approval, arguing that a contract built on exchanged funding payments is a swap under Dodd-Frank, not a future. 

That case is pending. An equity version adds the SEC’s jurisdiction to the mix and may draw a new set of objections from securities-side participants.

The approval lands five days after the largest theft in crypto’s history. On Oct. 29, attackers that TRM Labs and Chainalysis link to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group drained about $6.3 billion from Binance’s hot wallets in roughly 20 minutes. 

Binance reopened withdrawals on Sunday and says it has replenished about 95% of affected assets.

Selig used the breach to press the case he made in Tuesday’s statement. 

“The real issue here is that these are unregulated offshore exchanges, and they don’t have the same sorts of safeguards that we have in our financial markets here in the United States,” he told CNBC on Oct. 30. 

He said the hack “proves our exact point” about the agency’s October proposal, an advance notice of rulemaking that would create a voluntary federal registration path for crypto exchanges with cybersecurity, proof-of-reserves and custody requirements. Selig has said the CFTC cannot make that registration mandatory without Congress.

The equity perp approval works from the same premise. Perpetuals built the offshore derivatives business; moving them onto dual-registered U.S. exchanges puts the margin, clearing and surveillance rules of two federal agencies around them. 

Selig framed it as a choice between regulated access and “being forced to turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues.”

This post CFTC Opens U.S. Stock Market to Equity Perpetual Futures first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.