The comment letter is the clearest signal yet that Hyperliquid intends to be regulated in the United States rather than merely referenced by policymakers. President Trump named the platform at an 18 August press conference.
The Hyperliquid Policy Center on Monday filed a comment letter with the SEC and CFTC arguing that cash-settled perpetual contracts should be classified by their economic structure rather than by the asset they reference. The immediate implication: contracts on individual US stocks, currently unavailable to American traders on any regulated venue, would sit in the same category as bitcoin perpetuals if the two exhibit the same futures-like characteristics.
The filing is the clearest signal yet that Hyperliquid intends to be regulated in the United States rather than merely referenced by policymakers. President Trump named the platform at an 18 August press conference, saying CFTC Chair Mike Selig was working to bring the exchange onshore in a fully compliant and legal fashion. Options desks noticed. Call-buying on Hyperliquid-adjacent instruments the following morning drew scrutiny for its timing.
The policy substance is narrower than the political attention. The comment letter asks the two agencies to recognise cash-settled equity perpetuals as security futures, a category jointly overseen by the SEC and CFTC that has been dormant for most of its existence. Fewer than two dozen single-stock security futures traded on US venues before OneChicago closed in 2020, and no exchange currently lists them. Hyperliquid is arguing that the classification already exists, the market has demonstrated demand, and the regulators should apply the framework rather than invent a new one.
The scale claim is designed to catch attention. The Policy Center cited more than $480 billion of volume across Hyperliquid perpetual markets over the past ten months, covering oil, metals, currency pairs, equity indices and individual stocks, and pointed to nearly $3 trillion of notional trading in 2025 as evidence that the addressable market is not theoretical. American users cannot legally trade any of it. The liquidity and infrastructure the filing describes developed offshore precisely because the domestic regulatory route was closed.
The letter's core argument is technical and difficult to refute head-on. A perpetual contract on Tesla stock and a perpetual contract on bitcoin share the same funding-rate mechanism, the same margin structure, the same settlement design. The only material difference is the reference asset. Classifying one as a swap under CFTC exclusive jurisdiction and the other as a security-based swap under SEC jurisdiction produces the regulatory gaps that offshore venues have exploited for years. Treating them both as security futures collapses the arbitrage.
Whether the two agencies agree is the harder question. Security futures require dually registered intermediaries, coordinated margin rules and a shared enforcement regime, none of which either regulator has invested serious political capital in for the better part of two decades. Both are also mid-way through separate crypto rulemakings. The SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets proposal opened for a 60-day comment period after publication in the Federal Register, and the CLARITY Act market-structure bill is stalled in the Senate with a handful of Democratic votes still uncommitted. Adding a perpetual futures framework to that queue would require either committee focus that does not currently exist or a direct executive push.
CME Group is the obvious opposition. The Chicago venue has spent 15 years positioning itself as the sole domestic route for institutional crypto derivatives and would object to a regime that legitimises an offshore competitor. Coinbase, which has built its derivatives business through the acquired FairX venue, sits in a similar position on the crypto side. Both would prefer a framework that requires perpetual issuers to route through existing SEF or DCM infrastructure rather than one that recognises Hyperliquid's onchain model directly.
The strategic logic behind the filing is worth spelling out. Hyperliquid is not asking for a permit to operate; it is asking regulators to change the rulebook it would operate under before applying. The HIP-3 book cleared $4 billion in permissionless perpetuals earlier this month with CME market makers reportedly evaluating the venue, which suggests the commercial groundwork is already in place. The regulatory groundwork has now caught up with it.
The near-term test is procedural. A comment letter submitted to two agencies without a formal rulemaking underway does not compel a response, and neither the SEC nor the CFTC is obliged to open a joint proceeding on security futures. What the filing does is establish a legal record and a political anchor. If the CFTC moves first to bring Hyperliquid onshore under a swap classification, the Policy Center's argument becomes the basis for challenging that framing later. If Congress writes a market-structure bill that ignores perpetuals entirely, the same argument becomes the basis for the industry's response.
