The Impending Gold Rush for The US Perp Market

Yesterday, a shot rang out across the industry. 

The CFTC gave approval for Kalshi to create and offer the first true bitcoin-referenced perp, BTCPERP, for US users. 

Additionally, Coinbase ExchangeCoinbase is one of the worlds oldest and largest crypto exchanges.View Profile” class=”stubHighlight”> Coinbase got a no-action letter (approval?) to allow it to connect U.S. clients to existing global perps and options markets (as opposed to Coinbase producing its own). 

At the time of writing, HYPE, the $60b leading perp gorilla, is breaking ATHs on the news. 

The CFTC Greenlights Crypto Perps in America on Bankless

The CFTC just took its most significant crypto action in years.

Chomping at the Bit

There are many players poised to rush into the non-existent U.S. perp marketplace. Kalshi has gotten there first, but this is just the beginning of what’s going to be a very big fight for market dominance. 

For example:

• Hyperliquid DerivativesHyperliquid is a Decentralized Exchange and L1 for perpetual futures trading.View Profile” class=”stubHighlight”> Hyperliquid is in DC with the Hyperliquid Policy Center. 
• Lighter is working on US regulatory compliance. 
• Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, and OKX all have perps they’d love to offer the U.S. market. 

And even the prediction market platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, see the absolute goldmine up for grabs here. Plenty of very well capitalized entities are all building up energy to make aggressive moves into the U.S. perp industry. 

testing @polymarket pic.twitter.com/8D26o9jQag

— threadguy (@notthreadguy) May 29, 2026

The Size of the Prize

The nature of a perpetual market is to offer an incredible amount of leverage, and with incredible amounts of leverage comes massive volumes… and gargantuan fees to be collected by the exchange. 

Global crypto perp trading volume doubled from $29 trillion in 2023, to $58.5 trillion in 2024, and then in 2025 it reached $85.7 trillion dollars. Truly massive numbers. 

That said, exchanges typically charge somewhere between 2 and 5 basis points on perps, which are low fees relatively speaking. Yet when the volume is measured in trillions of dollars… things really add up. 

For illustrative purposes, derivative volume revenue made up 88% of OKX’s total revenue in 2024. Without having done too much digging, I think Binance ExchangeBinance is a major centralized exchange and crypto ecosystem leader.View Profile” class=”stubHighlight”> Binance is lower than this, in the 60-70% range, but it’s still absolutely massive numbers. 

Either way, perpetuals are incredibly profitable, and this is all without ever touching the onshore domestic U.S. market. 

Perps Will Eat All Of Trading

Some people think that all of TradFi will eventually become perp-pilled and all of trading will eventually get perped, simply because the perp is an incredibly efficient and elegant instrument, and far more intuitive for retail investors than options. 

Importantly, the perp generalizes beyond crypto. A perp market doesn’t care what the market is referencing; it just needs an oracle price. Anything quotable can become a perp. 

Perps meet finance and markets where they are: 24/7/365. The fact that U.S. equity markets are only open 3.6% of the total time in a year is an aberration. Conceptually, “the market” is an omnipresent phenomenon, so long as there are buyers and sellers. Markets are perpetual, and they’re going to be best expressed in perps. 

Liquidity is a gravitational pull, and perps have already consumed 90% of crypto volume. Simply because of the high leverage, perps bring in massive amounts of volume, which is what is going to make it be the leading mechanism for price discovery in any market. 

At least, these are the arguments, which I personally find compelling. 

The Risks of Leverage

You, reader, probably shouldn’t touch leverage. But some of you, like me, do it anyway. 

But the real risks of perps is simply how top-heavy they are. When 90% of volume is via derivatives instead of spot… you can overload a market that doesn’t have the real underlying liquidity to support it. 

We saw this this week when the Hyperliquid SPACEX-USDH perp flash-crashed, wiping ~$1.5M in notional in 30 minutes off one outsized position, in thin liquidity.

This is what sends shivers down regulators spine: a tail that wags the dog, except if it wags too hard, the dog dies.