The agency approved Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract, the first bitcoin perpetual on a registered U.S. exchange, and in a separate action cleared Coinbase to route customers to its offshore Deribit affiliate. Together the moves open an onshore path for a product long pushed abroad and raise the competitive stakes for dominant venues such as Hyperliquid.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved the first bitcoin perpetual futures contract on a registered U.S. exchange on Friday, clearing a product that American traders have long had to access on offshore venues.
The agency issued an Order for Approval to KalshiEX, a designated contract market, for its BTCPERP contract, a perpetual that references the spot price of bitcoin and will be listed as a futures contract, the CFTC said in a release Friday. KalshiEX is the CFTC-registered designated contract market operated by Kalshi, the prediction-market company.
The CFTC paired the order with a policy statement setting a case-by-case review process for future perpetuals. Perpetual futures, contracts that let traders take leveraged positions without an expiration date, have become the dominant form of crypto derivatives trading globally, yet have been largely unavailable on regulated U.S. exchanges. The new framework does not carry the force of a formal rule, meaning future agency leadership could change it.
Selig Frames It as Onshoring
CFTC Chairman Mike Selig tied the move to the agency’s stated goal of bringing crypto perpetuals onshore. He called it “historic action” that charts a path for one of the most liquid parts of the crypto market “to exist within the US regulatory framework,” Selig wrote on X Friday.
Selig said earlier regulators had taken a “decelerationist approach” of regulation-by-enforcement that forced builders to “flee the US,” and credited President Trump with reversing course, adding that the U.S. is “now the crypto capital of the world.” He said the action keeps novel products on regulated exchanges that uphold customer protections and market integrity.
A Separate No-Action Path for Coinbase
In a separate action the same day, the CFTC’s Market Participants Division granted no-action relief to Coinbase Financial Markets, the derivatives arm of Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange. The relief lets U.S. customers access perpetual contracts listed on Coinbase’s offshore affiliate, which the staff said can be treated as foreign futures. It also permits Coinbase to post customer crypto and stablecoins, including bitcoin and ether, as margin collateral.
The arrangement routes U.S. traders into Deribit, the largest crypto options venue, which Coinbase acquired for $2.9 billion. Coinbase framed the development as the first time a regulated firm has brought global crypto options and perpetuals to U.S. customers. Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, called it a “massive first for the industry” in a post on X.
The distinction between the two actions is that Kalshi received an order to list a domestic perpetual, while Coinbase received relief to connect customers to products listed offshore.
Onshoring Perpetuals
Perpetuals account for the bulk of crypto derivatives activity, but U.S. regulators historically pushed that trading to venues outside their jurisdiction, leaving American retail and institutional traders reliant on offshore exchanges such as Binance, Bybit and OKX. The policy statement said the market for perpetuals had largely developed offshore because of regulatory uncertainty over how the contracts should be classified.
The order also marks a step beyond the perpetual-style futures that Coinbase and others began listing in 2025 through self-certification, which carried multi-year expirations rather than the open-ended structure of a true perpetual. The policy statement said other asset classes, including equities and commodities, must go through case-by-case review, and that equity-linked perpetuals would also require input from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Implications for Hyperliquid
The approval introduces a regulated, onshore alternative to the offshore and decentralized venues that have run the perpetuals market, a category led onchain by Hyperliquid, the largest perpetual futures DEX.
Hyperliquid welcomed the decision but pressed for a framework that reaches beyond centralized firms. The agency’s actions should be workable “not only for centralized intermediaries, but for the onchain protocols where the most significant perpetuals activity actually occurs,” the Hyperliquid Policy Center said in a statement on X Friday.
It called the moves “a long-overdue acknowledgment” that perpetuals are a legitimate tool for price discovery and risk management, and said regulatory ambiguity had driven the market offshore and undermined U.S. competitiveness.
Decentralized vs. Centralized Perps
Hyperliquid held open interest of roughly $7 billion to $9 billion across recent snapshots and processed about $173 billion in perpetual volume over the past 30 days, DefiLlama data show. That puts it well ahead of rivals such as Aster and Lighter. Even so, decentralized perps account for only about a tenth of total perpetuals volume, according to CoinGecko’s 2026 perpetuals report, with offshore centralized exchanges handling the rest.
Hyperliquid’s draw, self-custody, no identity checks, high leverage and permissionless markets that list long-tail assets through its HIP-3 framework, is largely what a CFTC-regulated venue cannot match. The Kalshi and Coinbase-linked products carry leverage limits, volatility controls and know-your-customer requirements.
The risks of thinly traded perpetuals surfaced this week, when a flash crash in Hyperliquid’s SPACEX-USDH contract, which tracks a valuation for SpaceX, wiped out about $1.5 million in notional value within 30 minutes after one outsized position absorbed the market’s limited liquidity. Regulators have cited such episodes in arguing for the controls built into the new onshore products.
To be sure, a credible onshore venue could capture institutional and U.S.-based demand that might otherwise have moved onchain over time, and regulatory legitimacy could expand the overall perpetuals market in ways that benefit decentralized platforms too.
HYPE, Hyperliquid’s native token, carried a market value of nearly $14.6 billion and is up about 10% over the past week, according to CoinGecko. The token reached a record near $66 today, driven by Hyperliquid-specific catalysts including pre-IPO trading activity and ETF inflows rather than the regulatory news.
What Comes Next
Selig has said more perpetual authorizations are coming, and the policy statement lays out how the agency will review contracts referencing other assets.
The pace of those approvals, and whether the framework extends to the onchain protocols Hyperliquid flagged, will test whether regulated onshore products can pull volume from the offshore and decentralized venues that still dominate the market.
