Then the regulator stepped in. On June 22, the CFTC opened a request for comment on extending perpetual contracts to physically-delivered crude oil; 67 questions on reference prices, liquidity, position limits, and customer protection. And when the CME tried to self-certify its 24/7 oil contract in July, the CFTC stayed it, blocking the fast track and forcing a full review first.
This story – the market sprinting toward round-the-clock leveraged access to everything, and the rule-writers trying to decide how fast is safe – will keep repeating as the U.S. works to onshore derivatives flow and exchanges push for a level playing field with their offshore counterparts. When the biggest U.S. derivatives exchange is shrinking oil contracts for 24/7 retail access, and the U.S. derivatives regulator is drafting the rules for perpetual oil, you can stop debating whether the model won. It won.
So the interesting conversation isn’t “are perps spreading.” It’s three sharper questions: which asset classes get perpetuals next, where the leverage actually concentrates, and what breaks along the way.
On what’s next, follow the friction. Perps are most valuable precisely where the traditional market is most annoying, where it closes at night, gates you by geography, demands accreditation, or settles at a crawl. That’s why commodities, pre-IPO equities, and hard-to-reach foreign stocks got perpetuals first: enormous latent demand, hopelessly constrained access. The same logic points straight at private credit, carbon, freight, and the long tail of real-world assets coming onchain. Anything with a reference price and a frustrated audience is a candidate. The underlying almost doesn’t matter; the demand to trade it freely does.
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