The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has opened the door for perpetual futures tied to individual stocks, bringing one of crypto’s most widely used trading instruments into traditional equity markets for the first time.
On Tuesday, the CFTC said equity perpetual futures, or perpetual contracts linked to single stocks, can now begin trading on CFTC-registered exchanges.
Crypto-style perps move into stock markets
Perpetual futures have long been a staple of crypto trading. They track the price of an asset but do not expire, allowing traders to maintain leveraged positions indefinitely as long as they satisfy margin and funding requirements. Until now, those products had largely remained out of reach for U.S. traders.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig cast the decision as the latest step in a broader effort to bring perpetual derivatives onshore.
「In my inaugural remarks, I directed the CFTC to use the tools at its disposal to onshore perpetual derivative products so that they can flourish in the U.S., subject to appropriate safeguards,」 he said, describing the stock contracts as an extension of the agency’s earlier approval of the first true Bitcoin perpetual futures on a regulated U.S. exchange.
Kalshi approval set an earlier precedent
As Decrypt previously reported, the CFTC cleared Bitcoin perpetual futures for Kalshi earlier this year.
Selig returned to an argument he has made before: that regulated U.S. venues are safer than the offshore platforms traders have otherwise had to use.
Bringing these products into regulated markets, he said, 「ensures that American investors and traders can access these products within the protections of the CFTC’s proven regulatory framework, rather than being forced to turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues.」
He pressed the same point last week, using the record Binance hack to argue that offshore exchanges need U.S. oversight.
Joint oversight from the CFTC and SEC
The equity perps were deemed approved as security futures products under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That places them under joint oversight by the CFTC and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Selig also credited a historic memorandum of understanding signed by the two agencies in March with ending the jurisdictional limbo that had left such products stranded in what SEC Chairman Paul Atkins called a regulatory 「no man’s land.」
Broader push to bring perps onshore
The approval lands as the push to bring perpetual products into the U.S. regulatory perimeter gathers pace. The CFTC has floated plans to bring crypto exchanges under federal oversight, dismissed a CME lawsuit challenging crypto perpetual futures, and cleared the way for Coinbase, which recently filed to list single-stock perps tied to names including Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia.
For Selig, the objective was explicit: making sure 「the new frontier of finance is built in the United States of America.」
