Weekly Recap: US Perps Go Onshore, CME Sues to Stop Them

US perpetuals went onshore this week. Kraken and Coinbase lit up CFTC-regulated perp futures on Monday — and by Friday CME was suing the CFTC to stop the rollout from spreading.

Alongside it: AWS wired Coinbase's x402 protocol into CloudFront for AI-agent payments, and the US government's shutdown of Anthropic's Fable model gave crypto-AI its cleanest case for a decentralized stack.

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WATCH

NEAR's AI Vindication

If centralized AI just gave crypto its case, NEAR is the chain that's been building for it. Camila Russo sits down with Illia Polosukhin, NEAR co-founder and one of the co-authors of the original "Attention Is All You Need" paper that started the modern AI era — on the day Anthropic's Fable model was shut down by the US government and the crypto-AI thesis NEAR has spent years building got its sharpest validation yet.

Kraken and Coinbase Bring Perps Onshore as US Derivatives Markets Shift

Kraken and Coinbase launched CFTC-regulated perpetual futures on Monday, ending years of offshore-only access for US traders. By Friday, CME Group sued the CFTC to halt the approval, arguing perps fit the Dodd-Frank definition of a swap and should clear through swap infrastructure. Kalshi and eleven other venues already filed under the same path.

Fable's Shutdown Hands Crypto Its Case for Decentralized AI

Anthropic's Fable model was shut down by the US government Thursday — a regulator action that severed customer access overnight. NEAR, Bittensor, Render, and Akash rallied on the news. The cohort had been building infrastructure for the case that frontier-AI customers face a structural single point of failure; Fable is the cleanest reference event for that thesis since the cohort formed.

AWS Plugs Coinbase's x402 Into CloudFront for AI-Agent Payments

Amazon Web Services integrated Coinbase's x402 payment protocol into CloudFront — the world's third-largest CDN now natively supports per-request USDC payments on Base. Publishers can charge AI agents for content, API calls, or compute through an HTTP 402 status code, with settlement happening onchain. It's the AI-agent-payments stack moving from white papers into TradFi cloud infrastructure.

Coinbase Goes Full-Stack Broker With AI Advisor and Options

Coinbase rolled out an SEC-registered AI advisor and equity options alongside its Monday perps launch, completing the move from crypto exchange to multi-asset retail broker. The advisor is the first SEC-registered AI offering personalized recommendations to retail; the options desk closes a stack that now spans spot crypto, perps, equities, options, and AI-guided portfolios from one account.

Uniswap's Biggest Day Ever: UNI Up 22% on $621M Volume

UNI gained 22% in 24 hours on $621M of volume — the protocol's largest single-day move on record, lifting Standard Chartered's 2030 target of roughly 40x current levels from a research note to a market-tested thesis. The rally reanchored DEX-token narratives across the board even as the broader DeFi fee base slumped on leverage drain.