Coinbase Wants to Put Wall Street on Perps: 50+ Single-Stock Perpetuals Filed 📈

Coinbase has filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to list single-stock perpetual futures in the United States, seeking to bring a derivatives product long associated with crypto markets to individual American equities. The filing, submitted Friday through Coinbase Derivatives, seeks regulatory approval for contracts that would give U.S. traders 24/5 exposure to individual stocks without owning the underlying shares. Coinbase described the planned offering as its "first set" of U.S. single-stock perpetuals, adding that the products would offer "around-the-clock exposure" without expiration dates.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Coinbase plans to initially launch roughly 50 to 60 contracts, with Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia among the named stocks. The proposed contracts are classified by the CFTC as single-stock futures, and the filing lists the product status as approval pending. The CFTC submission follows an earlier regulatory step by Coinbase Derivatives, which filed a Form 1-N with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 1 to register as a national securities exchange for the purpose of offering security futures.

Perpetual futures, commonly known as perps, are derivatives that track an asset's price but carry no fixed expiration date, allowing traders to hold positions indefinitely provided margin and funding requirements are met. The contracts use regular funding payments intended to keep prices anchored to the underlying asset and can be traded with leverage. Coinbase already operates a U.S. perpetual futures market for cryptocurrency products and became the first U.S. exchange cleared to offer regulated crypto perpetual futures earlier this year, later rolling out contracts with leverage up to 50x. Outside the United States, Coinbase launched stock perpetual futures in March, tracking major U.S. stocks and indexes including Apple and Nvidia, though those contracts were unavailable to U.S. persons at launch.

"Crypto was first, now it's time for stocks," Coinbase said when announcing the September 18 filing. The company added that the proposed products would build on its existing U.S. perpetual futures infrastructure, extending the structure beyond digital assets. Holding a single-stock perpetual would confer no shareholder rights, dividends or ownership, only price exposure to the underlying equity.

Contract specifications and leverage limits for the proposed U.S. stock perps were not fully detailed in the filing, and the products still require regulatory clearance before trading can begin. The move lands amid a broader push to bring perpetual futures onshore: the CFTC has approved $BTC perpetual futures for Kalshi, which has since expanded into commodities such as copper, while Polymarket has moved toward crypto perpetual futures of its own.