Arthur Hayes 'flattered' as Coinbase backs CFTC in stock perpetual futures fight

Coinbase stepped into federal court on November 10, 2026, filing an amicus brief to back the CFTC's authority to approve single-stock perpetual futures. Prediction market Kalshi and Payward, the parent company of Kraken, signed on alongside it. The trio is pushing back against a lawsuit from the Capital Markets Alliance, which is contesting whether the regulator should have approved the products at all.

Those approvals landed on November 2, 2026, when the CFTC greenlit applications from Coinbase Derivatives, Kalshi and Bitnomial. Perpetual futures are contracts with no expiration date, letting traders hold a position on an asset's price indefinitely rather than rolling it over each time a contract runs out.

Arthur Hayes has a personal stake in the nostalgia. BitMEX, the exchange he co-founded, introduced perpetual swaps in May 2016, back when the product was a fringe crypto experiment. He said the sight of Coinbase defending the same instrument on US stocks left him flattered, adding: 'Ten years later, Coinbase is in federal court defending the right to offer them on US stocks. I'm flattered.'

Judge Valerie Caproni has already denied a temporary restraining order that would have frozen the products while the case plays out, so the approvals remain standing for now. The denial is not a ruling on the merits of the dispute.

Coinbase officials have framed the issue around access, arguing US investors should be able to use derivatives products already available to traders elsewhere in the world. Bitnomial, the third approved applicant, has a direct stake too: if the approvals survive, all three would be positioned to offer a product US stock traders haven't had in this form.

The most immediate question is jurisdiction. If the court affirms the CFTC's power to approve single-stock perpetual futures, it would set a template for other firms looking to launch similar products. For Coinbase, it feeds a long-running push to expand beyond spot crypto trading into derivatives.