On Friday, Sept 18, Kalshi filed a proposed rule change with the SEC and submitted it to the CFTC to list perpetual futures on individual US stocks — hours after Coinbase submitted a near-identical proposal, with Kraken parent Payward joining through its Bitnomial exchange. The CFTC lists the trio's contracts as pending approval; sign-off would bring crypto's most-traded derivative structure to US equities for the first time.
On Friday, Sept 18, Kalshi filed a proposed rule change with the SEC and submitted it to the CFTC to list perpetual futures on individual US stocks — hours after Coinbase submitted a near-identical proposal, with Kraken parent Payward joining through its Bitnomial exchange. The CFTC lists the trio's contracts as pending approval; sign-off would bring crypto's most-traded derivative structure to US equities for the first time.
What happened: Three US-regulated venues filed on the same day to offer perpetual futures on individual US stocks. Kalshi submitted a proposed rule change to the SEC and the CFTC on Friday, Sept 18; the contracts would carry no expiration date, use periodic funding payments between longs and shorts to track the underlying, be cash-settled, treated as security futures products, and cleared through Kalshi's CFTC-registered clearinghouse, Kalshi Klear (Cointelegraph). Kalshi's filing covers 58 large-cap US stocks and ETFs — all with market caps north of $100B, per Crypto Briefing. Coinbase submitted its own proposal the same day, covering 50+ stocks and ETFs and targeting 24/5 trading (FinanceFeeds, CoinSpectator); the Wall Street Journal and Reuters covered the Coinbase filing on Sept 18. Payward — Kraken's parent — filed through its Bitnomial Exchange, planning to start with 10 US equities including Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, working toward 24/5 (Cointelegraph).
Key metric: 100+ proposed single-stock perpetual contracts across three venues (58 + 50+ + 10), all pending at the CFTC.
Comparison: The CFTC already approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual in May 2026, and BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP perps now trade on regulated US rails — the new filings swap the underlying from crypto assets to mega-cap stocks. The timing is the tell: three days after the CLARITY Act died 49-50 in the Senate (Sept 15), one day after the SEC's Innovation Exemption opened onchain trading of tokenized stocks (Sept 17), with SEC Chair Paul Atkins pledging the agency would 'act decisively' with or without legislation.
Why it matters: Perpetuals are crypto's volume engine — globally, perp turnover dwarfs spot — and the US equity market has never had them on a regulated venue. Approval would fuse crypto's around-the-clock, funding-rate trading culture with Nvidia, Apple and Tesla, in the same week regulators began building tokenized-stock rails. BTC tapped $85,000 Monday for the first time since January (The Block) — risk appetite is back just as the derivatives frontier opens.
Ondo Finance launched Ondo Intelligent Portfolios, a new onchain product category delivering portfolios built on strategies developed by BlackRock for Ondo as single transferable tokens. Three tokens went live today — High Income, Diversified Growth, High Growth — with smart-contract-level rebalancing, available to eligible investors outside the US.
US spot bitcoin ETFs have swung to net inflows of roughly $320M for 2026 (Bloomberg tally; ~$349M per Askthetape) — the first positive year-to-date print since April — after investors added about $4.6B since Aug 19, erasing a $5.69B deficit accumulated by July 13. BlackRock's IBIT captured ~$1.02B over four sessions as Bitcoin rallied ~35% from ~$64,100 to an eight-month high of $87,265.
On Monday, Sept 21, the European Central Bank switched on Pontes, a platform linking distributed-ledger markets to the Eurosystem's TARGET Services so eligible banks and market infra providers can settle tokenized bonds and funds in central-bank money. Christine Lagarde announced the go-live at Friday's Eurogroup, calling it 'a digital euro made available for banks.' It lands three days after the SEC's Innovation Exemption opened onchain trading of tokenized US stocks — the institutional tokenization race is now transatlantic.