Morning Minute: CFTC Clears Stock Perps, Gets Sued the Same Day

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors green after Dems sweep midterms; BTC at $78.3k
• Crypto’s $64M campaign against Sherrod Brown fails, several pro-crypto candidates lose
• Binance traced its $6.3B hack to a fake job interview & bad software download
• CFTC clears U.S. equity perps for trading; Citadel & others sue to stop it
• Circle reports earnings, revenue up 17% yoy (CRCL -3% premarket)

$81.8k$79.9k$78.0k$76.2k

24h HighHigh$78,626

24h LowLow$75,695

VolVol$1.1B

⚖️ CFTC Clears Stock Perps, Gets Sued the Same Day

A perpetual future is a leveraged bet on a price that never expires. You hold it as long as you can meet margin and keep paying a funding rate. It’s analog product would be options in TradFi, with a few differences (primarily no expiration date). Crypto traders have used them for years, mostly on offshore venues like Binance and onchain platforms like Hyperliquid, because U.S. law had no clear home for the product.

On Tuesday the CFTC said Americans can now trade them on individual stocks.

Hours later, Wall Street sued to stop it.

The approval came as a statement from CFTC Chairman Michael Selig. Equity perpetual futures are now tradable on CFTC-registered exchanges, classified as security futures products under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which puts them under joint CFTC and SEC oversight.