Cboe-Backed Group Sues CFTC Over Single-Stock Perps Approvals

Perpetual futures on individual stocks are a crypto-native product, pioneered offshore by Hyperliquid's roughly $5 billion-a-day market, that has never traded on a U.S.-registered exchange. Kalshi, Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial each applied on September 18 to list them, and the CFTC cleared the contracts the following Tuesday. The long-running jurisdictional fault line is whether these instruments are commodity futures under CFTC oversight or security-based swaps that belong with the SEC.

For now, traders on Kalshi, Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial can keep opening leveraged single-stock perp positions onshore rather than routing through offshore venues, since the judge refused to halt trading. The three exchanges keep a product line regulators had just blessed, while the Capital Markets Alliance, backed by Cboe and Citadel Securities, has so far failed to win the emergency freeze it wanted before the contracts gained a market foothold.

The case tests whether the CFTC can wave through products that mimic equity exposure without SEC sign-off, and a court finding that the agency 'exceeded its legal authority' is a serious marker, not a procedural footnote. It also exposes incumbent exchanges using litigation, not competing products, to blunt new entrants built on crypto-style perpetual funding mechanics. Both readings are legitimate: a jurisdictional gap is being tested, and an industry is also defending its turf.

The emergency ruling only decided whether trading continues while the case proceeds; the substantive question of CFTC authority is still unresolved. A ruling against the agency would force Kalshi, Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial to pull the contracts or restructure them as security futures, handing jurisdiction to the SEC. A win for the CFTC would cement an onshore path for products that currently flow mostly through Hyperliquid.