Ondo Urges SEC and CFTC To Allow US Stock Perpetual Futures Onshore

Crypto Derivatives & Regulation News

Ondo Finance has asked US regulators to open the door to perpetual futures tied to individual stocks, arguing that the products can operate within the country’s existing legal framework without requiring new legislation.

The company submittedthree comment letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) andCommodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Aug. 24 laying out the case for bringing offshore stock perpetuals activity back to US markets.
Ondo’s Panama-based affiliate already offers stablecoin-settledperpetual futures on individual US-listed stocks outside the United States. The platform recorded$8 billion in cumulative trading volume as of Aug. 14, roughly six weeks after its launch. Ondo argued that this activity, which is currently conducted offshore, should be brought onshore given that many of the underlying stocks are principally traded on US exchanges.

How Stock Perpetuals Would Work Under Existing Law

The core of Ondo’s argument is that perpetual futures on stocks do not require a fixed expiration date to qualify as security futures products under US law. “Nothing in the statutory definition of a security futures product requires a fixed expiration date,” the company wrote in its product-classification letter. Ondo argued that scheduled funding payments can keep perpetual contracts aligned with the price of their underlying stocks, performing a similar economic function to expiration in traditional futures contracts.

The company also addressed concerns around margining practices and market data, arguing that existing rules can accommodate both modern margining approaches and on-chain market data feeds. “Bringing that activity back to the US should not be an open question; it’s something both agencies should actively pursue,” Ondo said. The company ranks fourth amongtokenized real-world asset (RWA) managers by distributed value, with approximately $2.6 billion as of Sept. 2, according to RWA(dot)xyz data.

Related Article: SEC Proposes Blockchain and Tokenization Rules for Transfer Agents

Regulators Already Moving Toward On-Chain Markets

Ondo’s push comes as US regulators are reconsidering how their existing frameworks apply to on-chain financial products more broadly. President Donald Trump said in August 2026 that CFTC Chair Michael Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid, a platform best known for its on-chain perpetuals market, into the US in a fully compliant manner. Neither the CFTC nor Hyperliquid has publicly detailed how that would work. Hyperliquid’s native token(HYPE) gained more than 20% following Trump’s comments and has risen nearly 49% over the past month to trade around $81 on Sept. 2.

The SEC and CFTC signed a memorandum of understanding in March 2026 to coordinate oversight in areas where their jurisdictions overlap. On Sept. 1, the SEC separately proposed overhauling its decades-old transfer agent framework, citing growing demand for blockchain-native recordkeeping and tokenized securities in US markets. Ondo’s letters arrive as both agencies are actively reconsidering rules built for an earlier era of market infrastructure, with on-chain products pushing the boundaries of existing definitions on multiple fronts simultaneously.

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