U.S. Stock Perpetual Futures: SEC Expects Four Venues to Launch This Quarter

U.S. stock perpetual futures may be weeks away. On October 14, Richard Selway, the SEC's top market structure official, told the Security Traders Association's annual conference: "I expect at least four to begin to trade perpetual futures on securities sometime this quarter," Finance Magnates reported. The candidate pool is five CFTC regulated exchanges that filed SEC Form 1-N notices in September: Coinbase, Kalshi, Bitnomial, NADEX and ICE Futures.

For anyone who already trades equity perps onchain, this is the first time a U.S. regulated venue will price the same kind of contract on the same names. That creates a second reference price, a second funding rate and a new basis to watch.

What the SEC Said About U.S. Stock Perpetual Futures

Selway did not name the four venues, and none of the filings set public launch dates, according to StockPil, which covered the remarks on October 15. He also made clear the SEC is not judging business viability: "Our role is not to judge the likely commercial success or failure of these projects," he said, per Finance Magnates.

The legal path explains the speed. Form 1-N registration takes effect when the notice is submitted, without prior SEC approval, because the filers are already CFTC registered designated contract markets, Finance Magnates reported. The registration is limited to security futures products and does not let these venues run a general cash equities exchange.

Selway pointed to CME's July 27 launch of cash settled single stock futures on more than 50 U.S. stocks as the precedent. Those contracts carry expiry dates. The new products would not.

How Kalshi, Coinbase and Bitnomial Built the Contracts

KalshiEX, Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial Exchange filed proposed rule changes with the SEC on September 18, and all three were also submitted to the CFTC, according to FindKnowDo. The products are single stock security futures with no fixed expiration, where holders make periodic funding payments tied to the gap between the futures price and the stock price. That is the crypto perp mechanism, rebuilt inside securities law.

The listing standards are strict. To list, an underlying needs a $100 billion minimum market cap, $450 million in average daily trading value and more than 20 million deliverable shares, with a $50 billion market cap maintenance floor, per FindKnowDo. Position limits apply for the full life of the contract, not only the final three trading days that CFTC Rule 41.25(b)(3) requires. The SEC can still summarily abrogate the Kalshi and Coinbase filings within 60 days of effectiveness.

Each exchange routes customers through an affiliated futures commission merchant: Kalshi Prime, Coinbase Financial Markets and NinjaTrader Clearing. Kalshi plans to clear through Kalshi Klear, its CFTC registered clearinghouse, The Cryptonomist reported. Payward, the parent of Kraken, filed through Bitnomial for an initial set of 10 U.S. equities including Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, with planned 24/5 trading.

NADEX, which does business as Crypto.com Derivatives North America, took a separate route. Its Form 1-N took effect September 14 and lists ten proposed reference securities: Apple, AMD, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Micron, Nvidia, Tesla and SpaceX, Bitbase reported. It plans a fee of $0.10 per one share contract. CEO Kris Marszalek said: "We are working with the SEC and the CFTC to offer single-stock perps in the U.S." Funding rules and launch dates for NADEX perps have not been disclosed.

Stock Perps on Hyperliquid vs Regulated U.S. Venues

Hyperliquid got there first. HIP-3 lets outside builders deploy permissionless perpetual markets, including stocks and commodities, as CoinGabbar reported when HIP-3 open interest set a record in August. Each HIP-3 deployer stakes 500,000 HYPE, according to The Crypto Times. Hyperliquid itself remains closed to U.S. persons.

The overlap in names is large. The Payward and NADEX lists are mega cap tech, and the $100 billion listing bar in the Kalshi, Coinbase and Bitnomial filings keeps the U.S. menu to the largest stocks. So the first U.S. stock perps will not open a new market. They will open a second venue for the most traded one.

Hours are the sharpest difference. Payward plans 24/5, and NADEX says only that some products may trade around the clock where reliable underlying pricing exists. Onchain perps trade every hour of the week. If U.S. venues pause on weekends, weekend price discovery on mega cap names stays onchain, and the Monday reopen on a regulated venue becomes a gap event against a price that has already moved.

Funding Rate and Basis: What to Watch at Launch

Funding is where the two worlds will be easiest to compare. Both regimes use periodic payments to tie the perp to the stock. The frequency and formula on U.S. venues have not been published in the filings covered here, and FindKnowDo notes funding payment frequency is not stated. Once the contract specs are public, the spread between onchain and regulated funding on the same name becomes a direct read on where long demand is concentrated.

Expect basis to behave differently by session. During U.S. cash hours, the stock price anchors both venues and arbitrage should keep perps tight. Outside those hours, onchain books carry the risk alone. A widening gap between a Hyperliquid equity perp and its regulated counterpart at the open is a measurable signal, not noise.

Position limits matter for orderflow too. Limits that apply for the full contract life cap how large a single account can get on U.S. venues. Very large directional bets on mega cap names may keep living onchain, where wallet sizes are visible, instead of moving to the regulated books.

Tracking the Onchain Side Before U.S. Launch

The practical move now is to build a baseline before the first U.S. contract trades. Note how funding, open interest and order book imbalance behave on onchain equity perps through a normal week, especially around the Friday close and Sunday evening. When a regulated venue goes live on the same ticker, any change against that baseline is the footprint of new flow.

Buildix covers Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets alongside the main perps: the screener scans pairs side by side, and the pair view shows CVD, order book imbalance and VPIN for a single market. That is the cleanest way to see whether U.S. stock perps pull flow off chain or simply add a second book that reacts to the first.

The SEC has set the window as this quarter. The contract design is already public, the names are already known, and the onchain market is already trading them. The only open question is which book leads when the two disagree.