Commodity

CFTC staff issued a no-action letter Friday enabling designated contract markets to convert existing perpetual-style digital commodity futures into true perpetual futures, the latest piece of regulatory plumbing in the agency’s construction of a domestic crypto derivatives market.

The letter, release 9252-26, was announced via the CFTC’s official X account. It allows DCMs holding perpetual-style contracts, which carry multi-year expiry dates rather than an open-ended structure, to relist them as true perpetuals without triggering full re-certification under Regulation 40.3. The practical effect is that exchanges already running the funding-rate mechanism on long-dated futures can drop the expiry and migrate open interest into the genuine perpetual structure the CFTC approved in May.

The Conversion Path

A true perpetual futures contract has no expiry. Instead of converging on a settlement date, it uses a periodic funding rate, typically paid between long and short holders, to keep the contract price anchored to the spot price of the underlying asset. Perpetual-style futures, the workaround US venues had used since at least December 2025, mimic that economic function through a long-dated cash-settled contract, usually with a 10-year maturity and a daily funding adjustment.

Cboe announced bitcoin (PBT) and ether (PET) continuous futures planned to begin trading December 15, 2025, subject to regulatory review, with a 10-year expiration at listing and a daily cash adjustment. That structure gave institutional participants a regulated proxy, but it was not the native perpetual structure that dominates offshore crypto derivatives trading.

Today’s no-action letter bridges the two. DCMs can now submit conversion plans without going through the full 40.3 case-by-case review that the CFTC’s May 29 policy statement on perpetual contracts prescribed for new perpetual listings on asset classes beyond bitcoin.

Three Weeks of Rulemaking

The CFTC has moved in a concentrated burst. On May 29, the agency approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP contract, the first true perpetual futures product to receive Commission approval and list on a domestic DCM. The order was accompanied by the policy statement setting the Regulation 40.3 review standard for future applicants and a separate action clearing Coinbase Financial Markets to route customers to its offshore Deribit affiliate’s perpetuals as foreign futures.

Three days later, Kalshi filed to list perpetual futures on 12 altcoins, following the bitcoin approval with the first broad altcoin perp slate submitted for Commission review under the new 40.3 framework.

Today’s conversion-path letter adds a fourth piece: relief for incumbents already operating perpetual-style products, so they do not have to build a parallel listing from scratch to offer the true perpetual structure.

The CME Counterpoint

CME Group CEO Terry Duffy offered the incumbent view, calling US crypto perpetual futures “a disaster waiting to happen,” citing excessive leverage and retail risk.

CME has not announced plans to list a perpetual contract. Duffy’s framing positions CME’s existing crypto futures suite, which uses standard expiry and lower leverage, as the more conservative alternative in the regulated US perp debate.