Perpetual futures on individual stocks can trade on US-regulated exchanges for the first time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said on Tuesday. CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said the contracts, which he called "Equity Perps," were deemed approved under Commission Regulation 40.3 as security futures products.

For a trader, nothing is live yet. The statement is reported to name no exchange, list no contracts and set no launch date. Those details are expected to come from the exchanges themselves. Until a venue files and lists a contract, there is no US stock perp you can open.

A Crypto Product Moves Into Traditional Securities

A perpetual future is a futures contract with no expiry date. Instead of settling on a fixed day, it stays open, and traders on the long and short sides exchange regular funding payments that keep the contract's price close to the underlying asset. The design grew up on crypto exchanges.

The US path started with Bitcoin. The CFTC approved Kalshi's BTCPERP, the first US-listed Bitcoin perpetual, on May 29, and Kalshi later added gold and silver perps in September. Selig is reported to have described the stock contracts as an extension of that May decision "beyond digital commodities and into traditional securities."

Two Regulators, Two Sets of Rules

Because stock perps count as security futures, they fall under joint oversight of the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission. That means they must meet requirements under both commodities law and federal securities law.

In practice, that narrows where they can trade. The contracts are reported to be allowed only on exchanges that hold a CFTC designated contract market registration and are also notice-registered with the SEC as a national securities exchange for security futures. A crypto-native venue without both registrations would not qualify.

How well the two agencies coordinate is an open question. Some lawmakers have already said recent SEC and CFTC crypto rules fall short of what the industry wants.

A Legal Fight Hangs Over the Perp Model

The approval does not settle whether perps belong at the CFTC at all. CME Group is reported to have sued the agency in June over the Kalshi approval, arguing that a contract built on exchanged funding payments is a swap under Dodd-Frank, not a future. That case is said to be pending. If a court agreed with CME, the legal basis for these products could be in doubt.

The CFTC's primary statement could not be read for this article, so the exact wording of the approval and its conditions is not confirmed here.

Stock Exposure Is Already Going On-Chain

The move lands as crypto firms push into stocks from the other side. ICE and OKX plan a tokenized US stock platform that has drawn objections from Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet and JPMorgan, and the full list of objecting companies is not yet confirmed. Tokenized stocks are already trading, mostly outside US market hours.

The next thing to watch is the first exchange filing: which venue lists stock perps, which shares it picks and when trading starts.