Perpetual futures tied to individual US stocks can trade on American regulated exchanges for the first time, under an announcement CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig issued on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
Key takeaways
- Selig said the contracts, branded Equity Perps, are deemed approved under Commission Regulation 40.3 as security futures products.
- The contracts may list only on exchanges registered with the CFTC as designated contract markets and with the SEC as national securities exchanges.
- The approval extends the CFTC’s May 29 bitcoin perpetual decision beyond digital commodities and into traditional securities.
- CME Group’s June lawsuit over the Kalshi bitcoin perp is still pending, so the perps framework remains legally contested.
In a statement published on the CFTC’s site, Selig called the contracts Equity Perps and said they were deemed approved as security futures products under Commission Regulation 40.3. “This expansion marks a significant step towards allowing U.S. market participants, consistent with applicable law, to avail themselves of the advantages of perpetual futures,” Selig said in the statement. The CFTC’s own account announced the same move shortly after.
A five-month run from bitcoin to stocks
Equity Perps extend a rapid expansion of the same product line. On May 29 the CFTC approved Kalshi’s BTCPERP, the first US-listed bitcoin perpetual, and staff granted same-day no-action relief letting Coinbase Financial Markets route US clients into offshore perp and options liquidity. Kalshi added gold and silver perpetuals in September. Selig described the equity contracts as an extension of that May decision “beyond digital commodities and into traditional securities.”
Each step has widened the market structure questions the agency now carries. The CFTC is reviewing Kalshi after $5 billion in near-identical ether perp trades, and a separate proposal would put federal oversight of crypto exchanges in place through new registration frameworks. Selig has said the CFTC cannot make that voluntary registration mandatory without Congress.
Built on a 2000 statute and a March handshake
The legal route runs through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which created a joint CFTC-SEC regime for security futures products, and a memorandum of understanding the two agencies signed on March 11 to coordinate rulemaking and enforcement. Under the notice-registration framework, the contracts may trade only on exchanges that hold a CFTC designated contract market registration and an SEC notice registration as a national securities exchange.
Selig’s statement says US market participants should not be forced to turn to “offshore, and often unregulated, venues.” He made a broader version of that argument in a CNBC interview on October 30, after the Binance hack: “The real issue here is that these are unregulated offshore exchanges, and they don’t have the same sorts of safeguards that we have in our financial markets here in the United States,” he said, Decrypt reported.
The statement names no exchange, lists no contracts and sets no launch date; those details are left to the designated contract markets. CME Group’s June lawsuit against the CFTC, which argues the funding payments in Kalshi’s bitcoin perp make it a swap under Dodd-Frank rather than a future, remains pending.
