For the first time, a US trader will be able to bet on a single stock with a contract that never expires, inside a regulated US market. On Tuesday, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig cleared perpetual futures tied to individual stocks for registered US exchanges, and he put them under joint watch by the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. What traders watch next is plain. Which exchanges move first, and which stocks they list, because Selig's statement named neither.
Key points:
- The CFTC cleared stock perpetual futures, called equity perps, for regulated US exchanges for the first time, under existing security futures rules.
- Both the CFTC and the SEC will watch these contracts, using a framework from the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.
- No exchange or stock list was named yet, so this is a green light for the product, not a live menu traders can open today.
My own read is simple. This is the day stock perps stopped being an offshore crypto trick and started becoming a US market product. That does not mean every stock gets a perp tomorrow, and it does not mean the risk goes away. It means the fight over where these trades happen just moved onshore, where US rules, US courts, and US investor guards apply.
A perp works in a way most stock buyers have never used. You do not buy the share. You take a position on where its price goes, up or down, and the contract has no end date, so you do not have to roll it over each month the way old futures forced you to do. Traders often use borrowed money with these contracts, which can lift a win and can also lift a loss by the same amount. That last part is the part new traders skip, and it is the part that hurts first.
Read also: Crypto.com and OG.com Launch US Crypto Perps With 5x Leverage — What's Next?
Why stock perps took so long to reach the US
Here is the wrong idea many readers carry into this story. If crypto traders already use perps every day, US stock traders must have been able to use them too. They could not, and the reason was a turf split, not a lack of demand. A contract tied to a single stock sits on both sides of US law at once. It looks like a security, because its price tracks a share, and it looks like a futures contract, because of how it settles. For years, that split left stock perps stuck between two regulators, while crypto perps grew offshore and onchain, far from US rules.
Selig's move answers that split with an old law. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 set up joint CFTC and SEC watch for security futures, and Selig said equity perps were deemed approved under those rules. The two agencies also agreed to work more closely on products that cross their lines. In his words, bringing these products into regulated markets means American investors can use them under the CFTC's proven framework, instead of being pushed to offshore venues that often run with no US guards at all.
What Wall Street already did about perps
The demand did not wait for Washington. Perps recorded over $630 billion in trading volume over the past month, according to DeFiLlama data cited by CoinDesk. Treat that number with care. It comes from a data site, not from an audited exchange report, so it shows the size of the trend, not an exact count anyone has signed off on. Even with that caveat, the trend is hard to miss. Hyperliquid, an onchain venue for geared trading, grew into a major spot for this kind of bet, and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, recently put money into tradeXYZ, a builder of perp markets on Hyperliquid.
Washington had already started down this road before Tuesday. Earlier this year, the CFTC approved the first bitcoin perpetual futures contract on a regulated US exchange, with KalshiEX and Coinbase named as the venues that got the staff green light. In June, the agency asked for public comment on crude oil perps and round-the-clock trading. In August, President Donald Trump said at a White House meeting that the CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid into the US under federal rules. Tuesday's stock decision is the next step in that same push, and it is the first one that touches single shares directly.
The launch list is the real news still to come
Traders should not read this approval as a list of products they can trade this week. Selig's statement did not name one exchange, and it did not name one stock. That gap matters more than the headline, because the first launch will set the tone. A launch with a handful of big, liquid stocks on a well-known exchange reads very different from a launch with dozens of thin names on a venue no one has heard of. Watch the first names, not just the first press release.
Three open questions will shape how useful this product turns out to be. First, which hours will it trade? Stock market hours, or round the clock like crypto perps? Second, how much borrowed money will US venues allow, and what guards will they put on forced sales when a position moves against a trader? Third, what will the funding cost look like, since perps use regular funding payments to keep the contract price close to the share price, and those payments eat into a trade that sits open for weeks. None of those answers were in Tuesday's statement, so any article that claims to know them today is guessing.
For a trader who already uses crypto perps, the honest comparison is this. The product feels the same, but the guardrails will not be. A US exchange must answer to two regulators, must show how it handles customer money, and must face US courts when things break. An offshore venue may offer more names and looser terms, but it offers far less help when a trade goes wrong. That trade-off, more choice offshore against more guards onshore, is the real choice Tuesday put in front of US traders, and it will not be settled by one approval.
Before you touch a stock perp, write down four numbers so you can judge the trade instead of feeling your way through it. The exchange you plan to use, the exact stock and its funding cost, the most borrowed money you will allow yourself, and the loss point where you close no matter what the chart says. Check each new launch against those four lines. If a launch cannot answer them in plain words, wait for one that can. A product that needs a foggy pitch to sell itself is not a product you need to rush into.
Read also: What Are Crypto Perpetuals? A Beginner's Guide to Futures Trading
— BitByLine News Desk
This post is news only, not financial advice. BitByLine never tells anyone to buy or sell crypto, so whether you buy or not is your own decision and your own risk, and you should always do your own research first before you buy or sell anything.
Read our full Disclaimer.
Sources: CoinDesk, The Block
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