CFTC clears stock perpetual futures for US registered exchanges

Key points

• The CFTC said on 3 November that equity perpetual futures may trade on registered exchanges, with no expiry date.
• Chairman Michael Selig linked the move to his push to onshore perpetual products, after Bitcoin perps were cleared for Kalshi.
• The contracts sit under joint CFTC and SEC oversight, following a March memorandum of understanding between the two agencies.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has cleared equity perpetual futures, contracts tied to individual stocks, to trade on CFTC-registered exchanges in the US, Decrypt reports. The regulator announced the step on 3 November, bringing an instrument long popular in crypto into traditional equity markets for the first time.

Perpetual futures track an asset's price without an expiration date, so traders can hold leveraged positions for as long as they keep meeting margin and funding requirements. Until now such products have been largely unavailable to US traders.

Chairman Michael Selig described the approval as part of a campaign to bring perpetual products onshore, following the agency's earlier clearance of Bitcoin perpetual futures for Kalshi. He argued that regulated US venues offer stronger protections than the offshore platforms traders have otherwise used. Selig credited a memorandum of understanding signed by the two agencies in March with ending the jurisdictional limbo that SEC Chairman Paul Atkins had called a "no man's land".

The decision comes as several efforts to bring perpetual futures into US markets gather pace. The CFTC has floated plans for federal oversight of crypto exchanges and dismissed a CME lawsuit challenging crypto perpetual futures, and Coinbase has filed to list single-stock perpetuals on names including Apple, Tesla and Nvidia.

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