The CFTC docket records the submission as filing 2026-62, received Friday as a security futures listing under Rule 41.23(b), with the status shown as approval pending. The representative Apple contract is sized at a hundredth of the index, about $2.25 of exposure.
Coinbase Derivatives filed with the CFTC on Friday to list perpetual futures on individual US stocks. The regulator's industry filings docket records the submission as number 2026-62, received September 18 under the title "Listing of Security Futures Product_41.23(b)", with the product described as a single stock perpetual futures contract and the status shown as "Approval Pending (45)".
The classification is the part that decides how hard this is. Coinbase did not file the contracts as swaps, which sit under the CFTC alone. It filed them as security futures, a category the SEC and the CFTC oversee jointly, which requires intermediaries registered with both agencies, and which has sat almost unused since the venue built for it closed in 2020. Hyperliquid's policy arm spent August arguing to both regulators that equity perpetuals belong in exactly this category. Coinbase has now filed on that basis rather than waiting for an answer.
The Defiant, which read the submission, reports that the contracts are dollar settled, carry no expiration date, and would trade from 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday. Nodal Clear would clear them. Funding, the payment that holds a perpetual near its reference price, would change hands every hour, calculated from three-minute price readings and capped at 0.10 percent an hour in either direction.
That ceiling leaves a lot of room. Hourly funding held at the cap in one direction would come to 2.4 percent over a full day and 876 percent over a year, on a simple basis and before any compounding. Funding is two-sided and a cap is a limit rather than a rate, so neither figure predicts what holding a position would cost. What they measure is how far the contract can push traders back toward the reference price, which matters more here than on a crypto perpetual because these contracts keep trading through the hours when the stock itself does not.
The contracts are small. The representative Apple specification in the filing is set at 0.01 times the index, which The Defiant puts at roughly $2.25 of notional exposure with Apple near $225. Exposure to a single share would take 100 contracts. That is an increment priced for accounts trading a few dollars at a time.
The filing does not name the stocks. The Wall Street Journal reported that Coinbase plans roughly 50 to 60 contracts at launch, including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia, with trading targeted for later in 2026 if the regulators clear it; The Defiant, Cointelegraph and Decrypt have all carried that range since. It comes from the Journal's reporting rather than from any document on the CFTC's docket, which covers the contract type and not a roster.
Coinbase said on Friday that it is "building on the progress of our live US perps market" and is "working to bring liquid, 24/5 exposure to individual stocks". The company has offered stock perpetuals outside the United States since March 20, with up to 10 times leverage and settlement in USDC, and it holds British permissions to sell stocks and derivatives there. The leverage and margin terms for the American contracts have not appeared in anything published so far, and those are the terms that decide who can trade them.
The docket shows no listing date and no contract specifications beyond the product type. It does not establish that the CFTC will clear the filing, and because security futures are a shared category, the SEC's position on the contracts is not recorded there at all.
This is the second route into US equity exposure to move in as many days. The SEC on September 17 gave tokenized stock venues a five-year exemption with tight volume caps, a framework built around tokens representing the shares themselves rather than a leveraged claim on their price. Both now sit with the same two agencies, one as an order already issued and one as a filing under review.
Enforcement has been running ahead of the rulebook in the meantime. Two former Robinhood engineers were charged over perpetual trades placed on Hyperliquid, a venue Americans are not permitted to use. Coinbase's filing proposes to bring the same instrument onshore under a classification that has not been used for a listed product in six years.
