OG.com Brings Perpetuals to US Equities

OG.com, the prediction-market and derivatives platform spun off from Crypto.com, submitted a rules application to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Thursday, Sep. 24, seeking to list perpetual futures on individual US equities — becoming the fourth applicant after Coinbase, Kalshi, and Kraken parent Payward.

The proposal filed with the CFTC describes cash-settled single-stock futures with no expiration date, tradable 24 hours a day from Monday through Friday — a schedule extending well beyond the regular US equity trading session. The structure would let a trader hold a leveraged bet on Apple, take an NVIDIA position, or gain leveraged exposure to Amazon stock or Eli Lilly shares without a brokerage account.

Perpetual futures were introduced by BitMEX in 2016 on Bitcoin, and a US Justice Department complaint has described how the format keeps traders exposed without periodic contract rolls. Prices on such contracts track the underlying asset through periodic funding payments exchanged between long and short holders. Offshore crypto exchanges have operated the structure for years.

Coinbase filed first, on Sep. 18, while Payward's bid came through its Bitnomial exchange. For OG.com, the filing is an incremental step: the company already operates a CFTC-approved derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, and the application simply extends its listable products from prediction events to single names. Valued at $5 billion at the spin-off, the platform counts Robinhood among its shareholders under a multi-year pact routing prediction-market products through its regulated infrastructure, and chief executive Kris Marszalek signaled from the start that futures and perpetuals were the planned expansion.

SEC Staff Maps Out Staking Receipts

Running parallel to the perpetuals race, the Securities and Exchange Commission's Corporation Finance staff issued new FAQs on Sep. 25 mapping how staking — the practice of locking digital assets to help operate proof-of-stake networks — fits the federal securities laws. The answers carry no legal force and were neither approved nor disapproved by the Commission.

Under the guidance, a staking receipt for a digital commodity can qualify as a "digital tool" when it merely proves ownership of the deposited asset — holder keeps the underlying rights, gains no added financial benefit, and the issuer cannot transfer, lend, pledge, or otherwise deploy the deposit, or expose it to the issuer's creditors.

A receipt from a protocol-based liquid staking provider may instead be classified as a digital commodity when its value tracks a functional crypto network and market supply and demand.

The staff also addressed tokens first sold inside investment contracts: once a network is functional, software upgrades, development funding, and user-growth efforts do not, by themselves, count as the essential managerial work promised to buyers, so an issuer's pledge to keep providing them would not satisfy that element of the Howey test, the Supreme Court's benchmark for whether a transaction involves an investment contract. Buybacks of a non-security token on a functional network receive the same treatment, though a pre-functionality buyback pitched as a source of yield could matter. Separately, listing a token in the secondary market does not make a trading platform its promoter under Securities Act Rule 405. The full FAQ text is published on the SEC website.

CFTC Opens Tokenized Customer Funds

The CFTC moved on its own flank the same day. Its Market Participants, Market Oversight, and Clearing Risk divisions updated registrant FAQs on Sep. 24, adding answers on tokenized holdings of customer funds and on using distributed ledgers for recordkeeping.

A new question, Q12, allows customer money to sit in tokenized forms of investments the rules already permit, provided the tokenized asset meets the rule's requirements and confers on holders the same legal and economic rights as the traditional form. Questions Q13 through Q15 lay out how blockchain records can satisfy recordkeeping obligations. The update extends FAQ guidance first published Mar. 20 and supplements staff letter 25-39, on accepting crypto as margin, and letter 26-05.

Chairman Michael Selig framed the refresh as part of a broader clarity effort. In a Sep. 22 speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Treasury market conference, he argued that existing frameworks must be adjusted for blockchain and artificial intelligence deployed at scale. He noted that stablecoins became eligible margin collateral following the GENIUS Act, the federal statute governing payment stablecoins — a Feb. 6 staff no-action letter had already added payment stablecoins issued by a national trust bank — and suggested that crypto and precious metals such as silver may suit around-the-clock trading, while agricultural and energy products may not. The SEC's parallel Sep. 17 Innovation Exemption opened a path to on-chain trading of tokenized equities.

Case-by-Case Path Without CLARITY

Taken together, the three moves show Washington assembling market structure in pieces while the CLARITY Act, which would divide digital-asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, stalls — the Senate failed to advance the bill on Sep. 15. The documents differ in force: the OG.com application is a proposal, listable only after CFTC approval, whereas the SEC FAQ text states explicitly that staff answers bind no one and change no federal law.

Since May, the CFTC has approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetuals on a case-by-case basis and granted interim relief letting registered exchanges convert existing crypto futures into no-expiry contracts. Whether the four stock-perpetuals filings clear review quickly will show how far that piecemeal route reaches.