Coinbase Seeks CFTC Approval for US Single-Stock Perpetual Futures

Coinbase Derivatives has asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to approve a suite of cash-settled perpetual futures tied to individual U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds, extending its domestic perpetual-futures push from equity indexes to single securities.

U.S. customers cannot trade the proposed contracts yet. The CFTC docket lists Coinbase’s product as “Approval Pending (45),” and the Sept. 18 submission says the exchange intends to list the contracts shortly after Commission approval, subject to any other necessary regulatory approvals.

The filing classifies the products as security futures, placing them under the joint regulatory framework of the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission. Coinbase Derivatives is a CFTC-designated contract market and is notice-registered with the SEC as a national securities exchange solely for trading security futures products.

Coinbase announced that it had filed for the “first set” of U.S. single-stock perpetuals and said it was targeting 24/5 exposure. The filing itself does not enumerate the initial lineup. It uses an Apple contract as the representative specification and says the broader suite would reference liquid U.S.-listed equities and ETFs that meet the exchange’s listing standards.

The Wall Street Journal, in a report linked by Coinbase’s corporate account, said the company plans roughly 50 to 60 contracts, including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia, with a launch later this year if regulators approve them. Those names and the proposed count do not appear in the public CFTC submission reviewed by Converge.

How the Contracts Would Work

Each contract would have no fixed expiration date and would be settled in dollars rather than shares. Trading would run from 8 p.m. ET Sunday through 5 p.m. ET Friday, using a Coinbase-calculated index designed to track the referenced security across premarket, regular, after-hours and overnight sessions.

An hourly funding payment would help keep the futures price aligned with the stock or ETF price. When a contract trades above its reference price, long positions pay short positions; when it trades below, the payment reverses. The proposed rate is calculated from price readings taken every three minutes, smoothed against the prior hour and capped at plus or minus 0.10% per hour.

The contracts would be centrally cleared by Nodal Clear. Coinbase’s representative Apple specification uses a contract size equal to 0.01 times the Apple index, making the example notional about $2.25 when Apple trades near $225. The filing says other contracts would use the same structure while changing the referenced security and security-specific parameters.

The proposal follows Coinbase’s June launch of four perpetual-style equity-index futures tied to thematic baskets covering artificial intelligence, defense, U.S.-listed Chinese companies and large Nasdaq-listed technology companies. As The Defiant reported, those contracts brought the perpetual format onshore without giving traders direct exposure to one company’s shares.

Approval of the new filing would make that exposure more granular, but it would still not confer stock ownership, voting rights or shares. The next concrete step is a CFTC decision on Coinbase’s approval request; until then, the docket remains pending and the exchange has not published a firm trading date.