Coinbase Files to List Single-Stock Perpetuals in the US, and Ondo Argues the Law Already Allows It

Coinbase has filed notices with the US Securities and Exchange Commission seeking to list perpetual futures on individual stocks, trading around the clock, according to The Block and The Defiant. The company's existing US equity-derivatives lineup covers thematic stock indexes, and single names would be a step past that. Coinbase has said product approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is its next step.

A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date. Instead of settling on a fixed day it is held indefinitely, with a periodic funding payment between longs and shorts that pulls the contract price toward the spot price of the underlying. The design came out of offshore crypto venues, where it now carries most of the leveraged volume, and it has never been listed on a US venue against a single American stock.

Why it is a regulatory problem and not a technical one

A perpetual on one stock is a security-based swap in substance, and the SEC and CFTC split jurisdiction over that boundary. Single-name equity derivatives sit largely on the SEC's side, broad-based index products on the CFTC's, and the middle ground has been contested since Dodd-Frank drew the line. That is why Coinbase's route runs through notices to one regulator and product approval from the other.

Ondo Finance made the same argument in the abstract this week, telling the SEC and CFTC that existing US securities law can already accommodate perpetual futures tied to individual stocks and that the activity should be brought onshore, according to Cointelegraph. The onshore framing is the industry's strongest card: the volume exists, it is currently offshore, and a domestic venue is easier to supervise than a foreign one.

What 24/7 actually breaks

The hard part is not the contract, it is the reference price. A perpetual needs a spot price to fund against, and the underlying stock has no price when the New York Stock Exchange is closed. Overnight and weekend marks have to come from somewhere, and every venue that has tried this has had to choose between a stale last close, an index of other venues, or its own order book.

That is not hypothetical on this beat. A memecoin pool on Robinhood Chain holding tokenized Hims and Hers shares printed $132.64 against an equity that had closed on the Friday at $28.84, according to The Defiant, because the market was shut and nothing anchored the quote. A regulated perpetual would fund off a published index rather than a thin pool, which is precisely the difference an approval would be buying.

Where this sits against the rest of the field

Coinbase is already running regulated perpetual and dated futures for eligible Canadian traders with up to ten times leverage, according to Cointelegraph, so the product exists and the question is the jurisdiction. Elsewhere, the CFTC has asked a judge to throw out CME's challenge to its approval of a perpetual contract, arguing that the order lets any designated contract market list the products.

Nothing here is approved. Coinbase has filed, Ondo has argued, and both regulators still have to act. The thing to watch is not the filing but which agency answers first, because that determines whether US single-stock perpetuals are a securities product or a futures product, and everything downstream follows from the answer.