CFTC Clears Single-Stock Perpetual Futures for U.S. Traders

America's midterms are decided, and the Democrats swept both chambers of Congress. On election night, most of crypto's Washington outposts had likely written off the Clarity Act for the rest of Trump's term. Maybe a little too soon.

House Democrats are reportedly working on a market structure bill of their own. No text is public yet, but according to Crypto In America, it would build on Maxine Waters’ “Crypto Investor and Consumer Bill of Rights”, which failed to make it into Clarity in 2025, and reuse the Clarity provisions both parties had already agreed on in the Senate.

In other words, Clarity could return in pieces, under new management. That management would likely be Waters herself, who is expected to take over the House Financial Services Committee in January.

How the plan, as reported, would differ from Clarity:

1. Regulators: Clarity gave the CFTC the keys to crypto spot markets. The Democrats would play the UNO reverse card: a bigger supervisory role for the SEC and, as one industry source put it, "little to no role" for the CFTC.
2. Consumer protection: Exchanges would be treated more like brokers. Customers would get their money out within 24 hours, platforms would have to prove every month that customer assets are actually there, and SIPC-style coverage would kick in if they aren't.
3. Ethics: Few issues were fought over harder in Clarity's final months than how far ethics rules should reach into the President's own crypto business. Democrats want tougher limits on Trump and other federal officials than Republicans were willing to offer.

The industry had its fingers crossed for Clarity, but its collapse in September hasn't caused much of a setback. The regulators have been doing much of the work instead.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Mike Selig spent the year in a friendly contest over who serves the industry better. Their efforts ranged from making the SEC's "Project Crypto" a joint initiative in January and introducing an SEC innovation exemption for tokenized stock venues to the CFTC's work on bringing perpetual futures onshore (see today's top story).

Still, the industry knows how quickly that can turn. Any framework that makes the rules less dependent on who runs the agencies will remain in demand, whichever agency it puts in charge.

For now, Republicans call the Democrats' draft a "messaging bill". With Trump retaining veto power until 2029, the message is mostly for his successor.

IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:

• Schroders launches first tokenized fund on Solana
• CFTC clears perpetual futures on single stocks

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

• Binance recovers from $6.3 billion hack. The FBI attributed the attack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor unit, linked to the Lazarus Group, while Binance detailed how the attackers carried out a months-long campaign involving social engineering and compromised software. As of October 31, 98% of affected token assets had been replenished, with Binance covering all losses using company resources. The exchange is now gradually restoring withdrawals, with net outflows currently amounting to roughly 3% of total assets. 🇰🇵
• Schroders launches first tokenized fund on Solana. In partnership with tokenization firm Centrifuge, the British asset manager, which oversees more than $1 trillion, has brought its Schroder ISF Emerging Market Bond fund onchain, providing tokenized exposure to an actively managed emerging markets debt strategy. 💰️
• SEC recognizes Canton Coin as digital commodity. In a no-action letter, the SEC stated that Canton's native token qualifies as a digital commodity, citing its network-driven value and lack of centralized control. The division also confirmed it would not recommend enforcement action against validators and application providers minting Canton Coin without securities registration, provided they follow the described issuance model. 🪙
• Circle beats Q3 earnings expectations. Total revenue and reserve income rose 17% year-over-year to $865 million, partly driven by $182 million in revenue recognized from the private presale of ARC, the native token of its Arc blockchain. Despite the strong results, the stablecoin issuer also disclosed a 5% reduction in its workforce. 📈
• 21X and LayerZero complete pilot for onchain securities trading. The EU-regulated trading and settlement venue tested its onchain central limit order book on a private, permissioned deployment of LayerZero's Zero blockchain, focusing on tokenized U.S. equities. The month-long pilot achieved 10,000 order matches per second, a 45-fold performance improvement over the tested Layer 2 EVM baseline, without relying on offchain order matching. ⚡️

TOP STORY

CFTC Clears Single-Stock Perpetual Futures for U.S. Traders

Coming onshore: On Tuesday, the CFTC opened U.S. markets to perpetual futures on individual stocks. The regulator let applications from Kalshi, Coinbase and Kraken-owned Bitnomial pass without objection. Kalshi began trading the same day and has since handled more than $300 million in volume.

• Why it matters: The approval extends a push that Chairman Michael Selig made a CFTC priority in January. In ten months, the agency has approved perps on bitcoin, gold, silver, an equity index and now single stocks, without new legislation. The push targets the product at the center of crypto trading. Perps turned over nearly $62 trillion last year, more than three times spot volume, and almost all of that trading ran offshore.

A slow start at home: The U.S. market only opened in late May, when the CFTC approved Kalshi’s first bitcoin perps and let Coinbase offer U.S. institutions access to perps via Deribit, its Dubai-based derivatives exchange. After a slow summer, their combined weekly volume climbed past $40 billion in early October. Even that peak equals only about 3% of global crypto futures and perps volume, and most of it runs through Deribit.

Right now, U.S. perps are a fraction of a global market

The appeal reaches stocks: Perps owe their dominance in crypto to their design: they offer leverage, trade around the clock and never expire. The same design has found a second home in equities, where it lets traders take leveraged positions in single shares outside exchange hours. One of the biggest beneficiaries is trade[XYZ], whose markets on the onchain exchange Hyperliquid have processed more than $650 billion since October 2025.

ICE buys in: ICE is the first incumbent to buy into that business. Last week, the NYSE owner took a stake in trade[XYZ] and agreed to run its markets as a separate U.S. retail venue, pending approval. The venue would give ICE a new retail-focused futures business: its core markets, best known for Brent crude and interest-rate futures, are more than 99% institutional.

• “We see these perp markets as additive to our futures markets, not a replacement for them,” said Jeffrey C. Sprecher, Chair and CEO of ICE.

Incumbents push back: Not everyone welcomes perps as warmly as ICE. CME, the largest U.S. futures exchange operator, sued the CFTC in June over the agency’s bitcoin perp approval, arguing that contracts without an expiry date are swaps, which by law face stricter rules. Just hours after Tuesday’s announcement, the Capital Markets Alliance followed suit with the same case against stock perps, calling them security-based swaps that belong under SEC oversight. The newly formed alliance counts market maker Citadel Securities and options exchange operator Cboe among its members.

Retail business at stake: Both suits argue investor protection, yet CME’s complaint also says the new entrants “seek to compete with CME for retail customers” in futures markets. Cboe might face pressures as well: options, a product with similarly heavy retail use, produced $470 million of its $712 million in third-quarter net revenue. Perps offer similar leverage without strike prices to pick or contracts to roll over. That makes them simpler to trade and a direct rival for the same retail traders.

A first legal signal: Whether the incumbents’ arguments are enough to stop the CFTC’s onshoring push will likely be decided in court, and at least one judge sees the odds on their side. Despite declining an emergency halt of stock perp trading on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni found the alliance likely to succeed, since the contracts “appear to satisfy the definition of a swap.”

Outlook: But before any decision is made, the CFTC must answer the alliance’s request for a preliminary injunction by today, and the alliance has until November 10 to reply. An injunction would pause stock perp trading until the case is decided; without one, trading continues while the suit proceeds. With crypto market structure legislation stalled in the Senate, U.S. perps will likely continue to rest on agency decisions that a judge or a future Commission can reverse.

Dr. Hagen Weiss is Digital Assets Lead at PwC Legal in Germany, advising financial institutions and technology companies on digital asset regulation, blockchain and financial market infrastructure.

What dynamics are you seeing among European players in perpetual futures, and how is the U.S. push affecting the market?

In our advisory work, we see firms increasingly looking to the U.S. to establish perpetual futures businesses. Regulators there provide a more business-friendly approach to market participants to bring offerings onshore, drawing expertise away from Europe even as firms remain interested in serving European customers.

Europe's challenge lies in its more restrictive regulatory approach. Its derivatives framework offers important investor protections, but licensing costs, infrastructure requirements and retail leverage restrictions can make certain offerings less competitive.

Still, these hurdles can be overcome. Dutch platform One Trading demonstrates this: it secured a MiFID II trading venue license and integrated trading and settlement, reducing reliance on conventional clearing infrastructure and its costs subject to EMIR and MiFID II requirements.

We also have clients actively exploring alternative structures. One possible approach combines licensed trading and clearing with blockchain-based settlement and collateral management.

Yet replicating such models requires navigating complex licensing, developing suitable infrastructure and building a commercially viable business. Without a clear regulatory and legislative pathway for innovation, Europe risks losing further momentum, expertise and business to more accommodating jurisdictions like the U.S.

• Alpaca: Project Manager, EMEA (remote) 🌐
• Coinbase: Associate General Counsel, EU Legal, Luxembourg 🇱🇺
• Compound Foundation: Head of Growth, Remote 🌐
• eToro: Product Manager, Crypto, Limassol 🇨🇾
• OKX: Head of EEA Legal, Deputy General Counsel, Sliema 🇲🇹
• Revolut: Crypto Sales Executive, Europe (remote) 🇪🇺
• Talos: GM, Head of Data, London 🇬🇧
• Tether: Head of Licensing and Regulatory Authorisations, Poland (remote) 🇵🇱
• Wintermute: Business Development & Partnerships Director, London 🇬🇧

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• Takenos | $7 million | Seed extension : Latin American stablecoin platform for dollar accounts, cards, payroll and payouts.
• Lombard Systems | $4 million | Pre-seed and seed: Firm developing the Delivery-versus-Lock (DvL) standard, which enables institutions to use tokenized assets as collateral for loans and margin requirements without transferring them out of existing custody accounts.

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