Perpetual futures spent years as one of crypto's signature offshore products: contracts that never expire, trade around the clock every day of the week, and frequently carry eye-popping leverage. The Trump administration wants to bring them home. Some of the most established names in American derivatives are not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.

Four executives at incumbent exchanges and other key market participants told Reuters that perps could introduce serious new risks to the multitrillion-dollar US derivatives market. The warnings come after US regulators have already approved the contracts for both Bitcoin and individual stocks.

What perps are, and why they make people nervous

A traditional futures contract works like a lease: it has a set end date, and positions must be settled or rolled over when that date arrives. A perpetual future has no end date at all. Traders can hold a position indefinitely, and the market never closes for the night or the weekend.

To keep the contract's price anchored to the underlying asset, perps rely on a mechanism known as a funding rate — in practice, a periodic payment exchanged between traders on opposite sides of a position — which replaces the expiration date as the tool that stops the contract from drifting away from reality.

The bigger worry is leverage. Offshore venues have offered 50 to 100 times leverage, meaning a small deposit can control a very large position. At 50x, a move of just 2% against a trader can wipe out the entire stake.

The other key detail concerns who is trading. Perps are predominantly used by retail investors, not the institutional desks that dominate most regulated futures markets.

How Washington got here

The onshoring push has been led by Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael S. Selig. In May 2026, the agency approved Bitcoin perpetual futures — the first time such contracts were cleared for trading on a US-registered exchange. Single-stock equity perpetual futures followed, with CFTC approval arriving on November 3, 2026, moving perps out of the crypto corner and into the territory of traditional equities.

The scale of the prize helps explain the urgency. Offshore crypto perpetual trading volume hit $61.7 trillion in 2025, up 29% year over year, and nearly all of that activity took place outside US oversight. The administration's pitch is straightforward: if Americans are going to trade these products anyway, the volume might as well run through regulated domestic venues.

In August 2026, President Trump discussed bringing platforms like Hyperliquid — a major decentralized perps venue that operates on blockchain infrastructure rather than through a single centralized operator — onshore.

The incumbents push back in court

The pushback has gone well beyond quotes to reporters. CME Group sued the CFTC in June 2026 over the Bitcoin perps approval. The exchange operator's argument centers on classification: it contends that perpetuals should be treated as swaps, not futures, and that labeling them futures would unfairly harm competition among exchange operators.

That distinction carries real weight. Swaps — a class of derivative that has historically taken the form of customized contracts negotiated directly between two counterparties — and standardized exchange-traded futures sit under different regulatory regimes, so the label determines which rules apply and which venues can list the products.

A second legal front opened shortly after the equity perps decision. A group including Cboe and Citadel filed follow-on litigation in early November 2026.

What this means for traders, exchanges, and crypto

Supporters point to guardrails. Regulated US platforms may impose leverage limits of approximately 6x — a far cry from the 50x to 100x commonly available offshore.

Critics see the other side of that coin. Even at reduced leverage, perps combine round-the-clock trading, no expiration, and a heavily retail user base. Opponents worry that mix could unsettle risk management practices built up in the years after the 2008 financial crisis — daily margining, scheduled settlement cycles, and other systems designed around products with defined lifespans and trading hours, both of which perps lack.

CME's own lawsuit frames the issue partly in terms of competitive harm. Firms such as Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange, and Robinhood, the retail investing platform, may see increased activity if trading volume shifts toward regulated US venues. Offshore venues, including decentralized platforms like Hyperliquid, now face the prospect of regulated domestic competition for US users.

How much of that $61.7 trillion in offshore activity actually migrates will depend on whether traders accept lower leverage in exchange for regulatory protection.

The near-term variable to watch is the courts. If CME succeeds in having perpetuals classified as swaps, the regulatory foundation for the CFTC's approvals could be thrown into question, while the Cboe and Citadel case adds a second track targeting the equity perps approval directly.