CFTC Clears First Equity Perpetual Futures for US Exchanges

The CFTC just greenlit the first equity perpetual futures contracts for trading on US exchanges, according to Cointelegraph. That's a first for American markets, and it cracks open a product that crypto traders have been hammering for years.

Perpetual futures — perps, in trader shorthand — are derivatives with no expiry date. You hold them as long as you want, and funding rates keep the price tethered to the underlying. Crypto exchanges built empires on them. Traditional US venues never got the green light from regulators. Until now.

The approval puts equity perps on regulated US ground for the first time. That's a meaningful shift: the same contract structure that powered offshore crypto trading is now cleared to run on domestic exchanges, with equities as the underlying asset.

No word yet from the CFTC on which exchanges will list the contracts or when trading starts. The approval itself is the headline — everything else follows.

Expect the crypto-native crowd to watch this one closely. Equity perps on US soil blur the line between traditional derivatives and the 24/7, leverage-heavy style crypto traders already know.