Coinbase has taken its first formal steps towards offering US traders perpetual futures linked to individual shares, but the products will still require approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) before they can be launched.
The cryptocurrency exchange filed two notices with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 1 September covering separate regulated units of its business.
Coinbase Derivatives submitted Form 1-N to register as a security futures exchange, while Coinbase Financial Markets filed Form BD-N to register as a limited-purpose security futures broker-dealer.
Coinbase chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad said CFTC approval would be the next stage in the process. The filings establish the legal entities that would list and broker the contracts, but they do not yet allow US customers to trade them.
Shares in Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) rose 10.14% to $192.70 after the announcement.
Perpetual futures, commonly known as perps, are derivative contracts with no expiry date. Instead, a funding rate exchanged between traders holding long and short positions helps keep the contract price aligned with the underlying asset.
The structure allows traders to take leveraged positions on a share without owning it and to maintain those positions indefinitely, provided they meet the relevant margin requirements. The filings indicate Coinbase intends to bring to the US the same 24-hour, seven-day-a-week model it already operates in other markets, with trades settled in USDC.
Coinbase launched its share-based perpetual futures service for non-US customers on 20 March. Its initial offering included contracts based on the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla.
The service also included contracts tracking the SPY and QQQ exchange-traded funds in selected jurisdictions. US persons were specifically excluded from that launch, making the new SEC filings Coinbase’s first formal attempt to extend the product to the American market.
The company has been widening its ambitions in derivatives and other forms of trading. In June, chief executive Brian Armstrong said the platform “now includes pre-IPO perps, stock options, and tokenized stocks soon”. That expansion has been supported by Coinbase’s $2.9bn acquisition of Deribit.
Max Branzburg, Coinbase’s head of consumer and business products, has described the wider objective as “one account for everything you trade, settled instantly, open 24/7.”
Coinbase is not alone in seeking approval to offer perpetual contracts onshore in the US. Hyperliquid is also pursuing entry into the American market through a partnership with Payward, the parent company of Kraken.
That move followed President Donald Trump’s statement that the CFTC was working to bring Hyperliquid onshore “in a fully compliant and legal fashion.”
For Coinbase, however, the immediate issue is whether the CFTC approves the contracts themselves. The exchange already offers CFTC-regulated perpetual-style cryptocurrency futures to US customers, meaning the infrastructure needed to operate funding-rate contracts domestically is already in place.
The unresolved question is whether regulators will allow that framework to cover individual equities. It is also unclear whether any approval would permit leverage of up to 10 times on single stocks or impose stricter limits. The next filing is expected to provide more detail on that point.
Separately, the source article states that a Florida-based exchange announced plans to expand its digital asset services into Canada, with Coinbase providing cryptocurrency infrastructure. No further details about that expansion were provided.
