Coinbase Files to Bring Single-Stock Perpetual Futures to U.S. Traders

• Coinbase Derivatives has filed to list perpetual futures on individual U.S. stocks and ETFs.
• Apple is the representative contract, but the proposed rules create a framework for additional large-cap securities.
• The contracts would be regulated as security futures, bringing both the CFTC and SEC into the framework.
• The filing revisits a U.S. derivatives market that effectively disappeared when OneChicago stopped trading in 2020.

Coinbase is attempting something more ambitious than adding another asset class to its derivatives menu. It wants to transplant the perpetual futures model, one of crypto’s most heavily traded instruments, into the regulated U.S. equity market.

Coinbase Derivatives filed on September 18 to list cash-settled perpetual futures referencing individual stocks and exchange-traded funds. The CFTC currently lists the Single Stock Perpetual Futures Contract as a security futures product with approval pending.

Apple serves as the representative single-stock contract in the filing. The structure gives traders synthetic exposure to the underlying equity without purchasing shares, while removing the fixed expiration date associated with traditional futures.

The bigger experiment is whether perpetual funding mechanics can revive a U.S. product category that has existed before, but never developed anything close to the liquidity of stock options or index futures.

Coinbase Is Starting With the Largest Stocks

The proposed listing standards make clear that Coinbase does not intend to build perpetuals around thinly traded equities.

For an individual stock to qualify initially, Coinbase proposes several requirements:

• Market capitalization: at least $100 billion
• Estimated deliverable supply: more than 20 million shares
• Average daily transaction value: at least $450 million over the previous six months
• Underlying market: the stock must meet the applicable requirements for an eligible U.S.-traded security

Maintenance thresholds would be lower, including a $50 billion market capitalization floor and at least $200 million in average daily transaction value over the previous calendar quarter.

The effect is to concentrate the product around securities where Coinbase can reference a deep underlying market. Apple fits that profile, as would many of the mega-cap technology stocks likely to attract derivatives demand.

Reports indicate Coinbase is considering roughly 50 to 60 stock perpetuals, potentially including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia, although individual listings remain subject to the regulatory process.

This is also a risk-control decision. A perpetual future needs a reliable reference price and enough underlying liquidity to make dislocations easier to identify. Those requirements become more important when leverage and recurring funding are added to a single-stock product.

Stocks Make Perpetual Futures More Complicated

Crypto perpetuals largely track assets that themselves trade continuously. Stocks do not.

A company can announce earnings, cut guidance, disclose an acquisition or face a material legal development outside the main U.S. session. Corporate actions introduce another layer: dividends, stock splits, rights offerings, spin-offs and mergers can all change the economics of exposure to a share.

Coinbase’s proposed framework accounts for these events through contract adjustments and Corporate Action Circulars rather than treating the perpetual as a simple price mirror.

The distinction is particularly important for dividends.

A shareholder can receive a cash dividend directly. A trader holding a perpetual future owns no underlying stock, meaning the derivative’s pricing and funding system must reflect the economic effect without turning the futures position into equity ownership.

Trading halts create a related problem. When price discovery in the underlying stock is interrupted, the derivative cannot rely on normal spot-market activity in the same way.

Those mechanics are where the Coinbase proposal becomes more interesting than simply putting an AAPL ticker inside a crypto-style trading interface.

U.S. Traders Have Seen Single-Stock Futures Before

Coinbase is not introducing single-stock futures to America.

The U.S. authorized security futures following the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, and trading began in 2002. OneChicago eventually became the country’s sole exchange listing security futures, operating under the same unusual intersection of securities and commodities regulation that Coinbase is now entering.

OneChicago offered futures on individual equities for nearly two decades.

The market reached meaningful scale in some areas but never displaced the much larger U.S. options and equity markets. CFTC records show annual OneChicago volume was close to 7.4 million contracts in 2019, while total open interest stood at 602,276 contracts at year-end. The exchange nevertheless discontinued trading operations in September 2020, leaving the U.S. without exchange-listed security futures.

That history changes how Coinbase’s filing should be viewed.

The question is not whether U.S. regulation can accommodate futures on individual stocks. It already has.
Coinbase is instead changing the contract design.

Traditional single-stock futures had expiration dates. Perpetual futures replace that expiry cycle with recurring funding designed to keep the derivative aligned with its reference market.

For traders accustomed to crypto derivatives, that removes the need to roll a position into the next futures contract. For the exchange, it creates a different challenge: maintaining alignment with an underlying equity whose market structure does not operate like Bitcoin or Ether.

Coinbase Already Tested the Model Offshore

Coinbase already offers equity perpetuals to eligible customers outside the United States.

Its international stock perps include exposure to major U.S. companies and ETFs, settle in USDC and can trade around the clock. Individual stock contracts can offer leverage of up to 10x, while selected ETF perpetuals can reach 20x.

The U.S. filing should not be read as evidence that those same leverage limits will automatically apply domestically.

Security futures have their own margin framework, and the SEC and CFTC historically imposed joint requirements on the category. In 2020, the commissions lowered the regulatory minimum initial and maintenance margin for an unhedged security-futures position from 20% to 15% of current market value.

Coinbase’s final customer margin structure will depend on the applicable rules and additional filings rather than its offshore product settings.

That distinction is important because leverage is one of the reasons perpetuals became so successful in crypto, but it cannot simply be imported unchanged into U.S. security futures.

Coinbase Is Entering a Dual-Regulator Market

Security futures sit in an unusual regulatory category because they combine characteristics of both securities and futures.

Coinbase Derivatives is a CFTC-designated contract market, while the security-futures structure also brings securities regulation into the product framework. The September 18 CFTC record still shows Coinbase’s contract as Approval Pending, meaning the filing is not equivalent to authorization to launch.

The company is also not pursuing the market alone.

The same CFTC records show numerous individual equity perpetuals filed by KEX on September 18, including contracts referencing Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, JPMorgan, Walmart, QQQ and SPY. Those products are also listed as approval pending.

That cluster of applications suggests the return of U.S. security futures could look very different from the OneChicago era.

The Real Test Is Liquidity, Not the Perpetual Label

OneChicago provides the most useful warning for the new generation of products: regulatory permission does not create a liquid market by itself.

Coinbase has advantages its predecessors did not have. Perpetual futures are already familiar to crypto derivatives traders, the exchange has an existing derivatives customer base, and a no-expiry structure removes the operational friction of repeatedly rolling contracts.

But single-stock perps would still compete for the same trading capital already served by shares, margin accounts, listed options and other equity derivatives.

That makes execution quality the metric worth watching if the products are approved.

Bid-ask spreads, order-book depth, open interest and funding behavior will show whether traders treat equity perpetuals as a useful new instrument or simply another way to obtain exposure already available elsewhere.

The historical comparison is therefore unusually clean. OneChicago proved that regulated U.S. single-stock futures could exist. Coinbase is testing whether perpetual mechanics can make traders actually want to use them at scale.