Six major crypto firms, including Coinbase, Kalshi, Kraken’s parent company Payward, DRW Holdings, Jump Trading, and Paradigm, just joined forces in federal court. They filed an emergency amicus brief defending the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The coalition wants the CFTC to legally regulate single-stock perpetual contracts inside the United States. Coinbase’s legal team argued that under the Commodity Exchange Act established in 2000, these financial products are officially classified as security futures, not swaps.
Today @Coinbase, @Kalshi, @Payward, DRW Holdings, @Jumptrading, and @Paradigm moved for leave to file an amicus brief defending the @CFTC’s authority to regulate single stock perpetuals in the US.
The law is clear. Under the CEA and the securities futures framework Congress established in 2000, security futures products are not “swaps.”
Others would rather litigate than compete with innovative products that promise to open up new markets and financial opportunities for American investors with the oversight and investor protection of the @CFTC and @SECGov built in.
Killing innovation won’t stop these products. It will just keep them offshore and unregulated. We’ve been working for years to onshore equity perps in a responsible and regulated way and won’t stop until we bring these products to our customers.
Read more in our brief 👇🏼
— Molly Abraham (@mollyisonchain) November 10, 2026
The companies warned that blocking these tools will not stop Americans from trading them; it will force retail investors onto unregulated, offshore platforms.
Legal and financial professionals immediately analyzed the court filing. A lawyer on X, @BirdnalsLAW, praised the legal team, noting how incredibly difficult it is to organize against massive rival companies and draft a high-quality brief in a single weekend to meet a strict Temporary Restraining Order deadline.
Good brief.
And crazy impressive to pull this group together and file a brief this well done over a weekend which is all they had after the Court set the TRO schedule. Well done by all involved 👏
— Birdnals (@BirdnalsLAW) November 10, 2026
An antitrust professional, @DSkalkowski, also congratulated the legal coalition on their fast, coordinated work.
@mollyisonchain @coinbase @Kalshi @Payward @jumptrading @paradigm @CFTC Great brief! Congrats to your team.
— Dawid Skałkowski (@DSkalkowski) November 10, 2026
Why the classification of stock perpetuals matters
The entire legal fight revolves around swaps. In the United States, financial regulators divide trading products into strict categories. If a financial contract is labeled a “swap,” it falls under incredibly heavy, restrictive rules designed primarily for massive Wall Street banks and institutional funds. These rules make it nearly impossible for a standard cryptocurrency exchange to offer the product to everyday people due to immense compliance costs and reporting barriers.
The crypto coalition is fighting to classify these products as security futures. In 2000, Congress created a specific legal framework allowing everyday investors to trade futures contracts on single corporate stocks. By forcing the government to recognize crypto perpetuals under this older futures framework, companies like Coinbase and Kraken can legally offer them to normal retail traders.
This classification removes the restriction on the swap market. It allows crypto platforms to finally build a legal, supervised environment where Americans can trade advanced equity contracts without breaking federal law or facing immediate lawsuits from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
How blocking US platforms pushes traders to offshore exchanges
For years, the most popular trading product in the global cryptocurrency market has been the perpetual contract. It allows traders to hold a leveraged position open forever without an expiration date. While the rest of the world trades trillions of dollars in these contracts daily, United States citizens were legally blocked from participating on domestic platforms.
The coalition warns that suing domestic companies to stop the sale of these products is a failed strategy. When regulators block local exchanges from building innovative trading tools, the demand does not disappear.
American traders use virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide their location and move their money to unregulated, offshore platforms based in foreign jurisdictions.
This creates a blind spot for the government. The United States loses all oversight of the money, the government loses tax revenue, and the American investor loses all legal protection if the foreign exchange gets hacked or goes bankrupt.
By fighting to get these products onshore, the coalition is trying to pull billions of dollars in trading volume back within US borders. They want to place this massive capital flow directly under the watch of federal agencies, replacing a dangerous shadow market with a transparent, taxable, and regulated domestic ecosystem.
Critic compares single-stock perpetuals to historical bucket shop bets
There has been criticism that single-stock perpetuals do not contribute to the real economy. QuantWolfLine on X attacked the supporting lawyers, arguing that single-stock perpetual contracts are nothing more than modern “bucket shop bets”, a historical term for illegal gambling houses where people bet on stock prices without ever buying the actual shares.
@mollyisonchain @coinbase @Kalshi @Payward @jumptrading @paradigm @CFTC If you really are “a lawyer”, shouldn’t you have at least a glancing acquaintance of bucket shop bets?
— WolfLine Salad Surgery (@QuantWolfLine) November 10, 2026
A century ago, bucket shops were illegal storefronts where customers placed cash bets on whether a stock would go up or down. The shop never actually bought the stock on a real exchange. Today, when a user buys a crypto perpetual contract on Nvidia or Tesla, they are not buying a piece of the company. The trader is only betting on the price line.
However, professional traders use these tools for critical capital efficiency and risk management. In a traditional stock market, if an investor wants to protect their portfolio against a sudden crash, they have to sell their shares, triggering massive tax bills and causing them to lose their position.
A perpetual contract allows that same investor to open a short position, a bet that the price will drop without selling their actual holdings. The crypto industry relies on these tools to manage risk during extreme market volatility. The current legal push is an attempt to prove that these contracts are not just reckless gambling but necessary tools for managing modern financial portfolios.
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