Perp-Eat Your Veggies: Coinbase, Kalshi & Kraken All File for Stock Perps in One Day 🧃

Coinbase, Kalshi and Payward, parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, each filed on Friday to offer U.S. traders single-stock perpetual futures, a derivatives product long popular in crypto markets that would give around-the-clock exposure to individual American equities without owning the underlying shares. Coinbase submitted its proposal through Coinbase Derivatives to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, seeking approval to list more than 50 single-stock perpetual futures on its regulated U.S. exchange. The Wall Street Journal reported that the planned lineup includes Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia, with Coinbase describing the products as the first U.S. single-stock perpetual futures offering. The CFTC classified the proposed contracts as single-stock futures and listed them as approval pending. "Crypto was first, now it's time for stocks," Coinbase said when announcing the filing, adding that the contracts would offer "around-the-clock exposure" without expiration dates on a 24/5 schedule.

Kalshi filed its own proposed rule change with the Securities and Exchange Commission and submitted it to the CFTC for approval on the same day, framing the contracts as security futures products cleared through its CFTC-registered clearinghouse, Kalshi Klear. The prediction market, which already offers perpetual futures tied to Bitcoin ($BTC), Ether ($ETH), Solana ($SOL) and XRP ($XRP) after receiving CFTC approval for its Bitcoin perpetual contract in May, said the new contracts would use periodic funding payments between long and short positions to keep prices aligned with the underlying stocks. Payward filed through its Bitnomial Exchange, with plans to initially offer perpetual futures tied to 10 U.S. equities, including Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, and to make them available to U.S. traders on Kraken, working toward 24/5 trading.

Perpetual futures, or perps, are derivatives contracts that track an asset's price but carry no expiration date, letting traders hold positions indefinitely as long as they meet margin and funding requirements, and typically allow leverage that increases both potential gains and losses. Coinbase became the first U.S. exchange cleared to offer regulated crypto perpetual futures earlier this year and later rolled out contracts with leverage up to 50x, and it already offers stock perpetual futures to eligible non-U.S. traders after launching the product in March. Coinbase Derivatives filed a Form 1-N with the SEC on Sept. 1 to register as a national securities exchange for the purpose of offering security futures, a step that preceded Friday's CFTC filing.

The filings come days after the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate on Sept. 15, falling short of the 60 votes needed to proceed. A day after the vote, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that "with or without legislation," the agency would "act decisively" within its existing statutory authority to provide regulatory certainty for American investors and entrepreneurs. Contract specifications and leverage limits were not fully detailed in the filings, and the products still require regulatory clearance before trading can begin, with Coinbase's filing submitted Friday and Kalshi's proposal still awaiting CFTC approval.