Perps Go Legally Inseparable: Kraken Crashes The CFTC's Perpetual Futures House Party 🇺🇸

Kraken on Monday rolled out perpetual futures trading for eligible US customers through Bitnomial, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated venue acquired by parent company Payward in April, expanding the exchange's domestic derivatives footprint. The contracts are available on Kraken Pro and are tied to Bitcoin ($BTC), Ether ($ETH), Solana ($SOL), XRP ($XRP), Cardano ($ADA), Chainlink ($LINK), Dogecoin ($DOGE), Litecoin ($LTC) and Avalanche ($AVAX). According to the announcement, the products share the same futures wallet as Kraken's existing CME-listed crypto futures, letting clients manage both sets of positions from one account.

Perpetual futures, derivative contracts with no expiration date, generated more than $60 trillion in global trading volume in 2025, according to Kraken, and have largely been executed on offshore platforms rather than regulated US venues. Kraken added support for CME-listed crypto futures in July 2025 and launched margin trading for eligible US customers earlier this month. The company first disclosed its Bitnomial-based perpetual futures plan in late May.

The launch lands in the middle of a broader push by US exchanges to bring crypto derivatives trading onshore. On May 29, the CFTC approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures contract and issued a no-action position for Coinbase, clearing a path for regulated perpetual products in the United States. Coinbase said the same day that its Coinbase Financial Markets unit would give US institutional clients access to global crypto perpetual futures and options markets, which the exchange said account for roughly 80% of global crypto trading volume. Kalshi also debuted perpetual futures on May 29, describing the contracts as its biggest expansion beyond prediction markets.

The regulatory clearances followed months of public discussion about how to onshore crypto perpetual futures. "The CFTC's approval of the KalshiEX BTCPERP is not the end of the regulatory story; it is the beginning," said Gontran de Quillacq, CEO and founder of Navesink International. In a January speech, CFTC Chair Michael Selig said the agency would use its existing authority to support perpetual futures and other novel derivatives products in the US, arguing that regulatory uncertainty had pushed trading activity offshore. Speaking later at the Milken Institute's Future of Finance conference, Selig said the CFTC was working to establish a framework for "true perpetual futures" in the US.