MetroTrade Monthly: Same Stocks, Different Directions

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MetroTrade Monthly: Same Stocks, Different Directions

Jul 30, 2026 | MetroTrade Monthly

MetroTrade Monthly is a monthly newsletter from David Klotz, President of MetroTrade, with thoughts, updates, and reflections from around the company and industry.

On July 27, CME Group launched Single Stock futures on more than 50 of the most actively traded U.S. companies: 55 standard-sized contracts and 22 Micro-sized companions, covering names like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, and SpaceX . It’s a straightforward product in concept: cash-settled futures contracts, listed on and subject to the rules of a CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market, that expire on a set date like every other futures contract CME has listed since 1898.

What makes the timing interesting is that this isn’t the first place a trader can get leveraged, derivatives-based exposure to AAPL or NVDA with no plans to ever own the shares. Kraken, Coinbase, and Hyperliquid have all built that product already; they just built a slightly different one, and they call it something a little different: perpetual futures, or “perps.” 

Longtime readers will recall we’ve been tracking the perpetual contract debate since TWWDT #15, when CME, CBOE, and Coinbase Derivatives had each launched what we described at the time as not-quite-true perpetuals. The category has moved fast since then, and single-name equities are the newest underlying to get the perpetual treatment. It’s worth laying the two side by side before the July 27 launch, because despite sharing a name, a regulator, and in some cases an underlying stock ticker, these are structurally different animals.

What the CME Is Actually Listing

CME’s Single Stock futures look like every other CME product retail and institutional traders already know. Standardized contract specs, daily mark-to-market, SPAN-based margin set and adjusted by the exchange, cleared through CME Clearing, and a fixed expiration date at which the contract settles in cash to a reference price. 

There’s no funding rate, no perpetual rollover mechanism, and no ambiguity about what kind of instrument it is under the Commodity Exchange Act: a future is a future because it has an expiration date and a defined delivery, or cash settlement, obligation. Access runs through the traditional channel: an FCM, customer segregated funds, and the full weight of CFTC oversight that comes with listing on a registered exchange.

What Kraken, Coinbase, and Hyperliquid Are Already Offering

The “perpetual” piece of perpetual futures is the headline feature on all three of these platforms, and it’s the same mechanism MetroTrade readers will recognize from the bitcoin and ether perpetual contracts that have dominated industry headlines since the CFTC’s approval of Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract this past May.

Kraken was first to single-name equities, launching xStocks Perps in late February on its Bermuda-licensed derivatives venue. The underlying is a tokenized, fully collateralized, 1:1-backed representation of the actual share (NVDAx, AAPLx, TSLAx, GOOGLx, and others) that trades on-chain 24/7, including weekends. 

The perpetual contract itself never expires; a funding rate paid between long and short holders keeps the contract price tethered to the tokenized reference price, and traders can run up to 20x leverage. The product is explicitly restricted to eligible non-U.S. clients in more than 110 countries and is offered through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd., a Bermuda Monetary Authority-licensed entity, not a CFTC- or SEC-registered one.

Coinbase followed in March with stock perpetual futures on a curated list of Magnificent Seven names (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla) plus SPY and QQQ index perps, settled in USDC . Leverage runs up to 10x on single names and 20x on the ETF contracts. Like Kraken, the product is offered to “eligible traders outside the US” through Coinbase Bermuda Ltd., a separate, Bermuda-regulated entity from the CFTC-registered Coinbase Derivatives Exchange that lists Coinbase’s actual regulated crypto futures. 

Coinbase’s own risk disclosures note that corporate actions like dividends aren’t paid out in cash to perp holders; instead, they’re “priced in via the funding rate and mark price” , which is as clean an admission as you’ll find that the contract is a synthetic stand-in for the stock, not a claim on it.

Hyperliquid took a third path entirely. Through its HIP-3 “builder-deployed perpetuals” framework, anyone willing to stake roughly $25 million in HYPE tokens can deploy their own perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure, choosing the asset, the oracle, and the leverage limits themselves . 

Felix Protocol used this framework to launch the first equity perpetual, a Tesla contract, in November 2025, and the lineup has since grown to cover AAPL, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN, META, and well over a hundred other tokenized stocks and ETFs. There is no Hyperliquid entity approving these listings, no KYC requirement to trade them, and no regulator anywhere in the chain. The deployer stakes collateral that can be slashed if the market misbehaves, and that’s the extent of the backstop.

And Then There’s Kalshi

Just last week, Kalshi filed for CFTC approval to list perpetual futures on gold, silver, and platinum. Kalshi’s contracts will trade 24 hours per day, 5 days per week to match the underlying precious metals markets. This comes on the heels of the CFTC approving leveraged crypto perpetual futures back in May. From the initial reports these look to be fully collateralized contracts, but that may change in the future as Kalshi’s business evolves, and while the contracts currently under review are precious metals derivatives, it’s a near certainty Kalshi has more contracts in the pipeline.

Why This Looks a Lot Like a CFD

Strip away the futures vocabulary and what’s left on all four platforms is familiar to anyone who has spent time around a UK or Australian retail brokerage: an agreement to exchange the difference in value of an underlying asset between two points in time, settled in cash, using leverage, with no transfer of ownership and no shareholder rights attached. That’s a contract for difference. CFDs aren’t available to US retail clients, not because a single statute names them outright, but because the SEC and CFTC treat them as swaps or security-based swaps under the post-2008 Dodd-Frank framework, and the off-exchange way they’re typically offered doesn’t fit the regulated market structure the US requires for retail derivatives. Every platform described above handles that the same way: Kraken and Coinbase wall the product off behind a separate Bermuda-licensed entity and a non-US-persons geofence, and Hyperliquid skips the entity altogether by never having had one to begin with.

The CME’s Own Lawsuit Makes This More Than Academic

This isn’t a hypothetical regulatory question MetroTrade is raising for the first time. On May 29, the CFTC approved Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract as a future (not a swap) in a review CME CEO Terry Duffy later complained looked more like the agency’s routine, same-day self-certification process than the longer review the CFTC’s own rules reserve for novel or complex products. The agency paired that order with a Policy Statement authorizing every other Designated Contract Market to self-certify similar digital-commodity perpetual contracts as futures, with no prior Commission review required at all. 

Within a week, Kalshi had self-certified more than a dozen additional crypto perpetuals and crossed a billion dollars in trading volume. The CFTC followed with a no-action letter clearing Coinbase to route US customers into its offshore Deribit perpetuals, and a second no-action letter on June 13 giving any DCM a path to convert existing crypto futures into true perpetuals simply by removing the expiration date.

CME filed suit against the CFTC and Chairman Michael Selig on June 18, arguing that the funding-rate mechanism at the heart of every perpetual contract (the periodic exchange of payments between counterparties used to keep a contract’s price tethered to spot, with no fixed delivery date) is the textbook definition of a swap under Dodd-Frank, not a future . 

CME’s complaint targets Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual specifically, but the mechanism it describes is identical to the one running underneath every perpetual contract listed above, and the same order CME is asking a federal court to vacate is the one that gave Kraken, Coinbase, and the rest of the field room to argue their own perpetual products sit on solid regulatory ground. CME chose the more conservative, established structure for its own July 27 product (daily settlement, fixed expiration, standardized margin) while simultaneously arguing in federal court that its own regulator spent a single afternoon waving an entire category of leveraged, no-expiration, payment-exchange contracts onto the futures side of the ledger, rather than the swap side where Congress put them after 2008.

What It Means for FCMs and IBs

For our readers, the practical distinction matters more than the legal theory. CME’s Single Stock futures will move through the same intermediated, segregated-funds structure your firm already operates: an FCM relationship, Regulation 30.7 protections, exchange-set SPAN margin, and CFTC position and reporting requirements. Leverage on a standardized futures contract is a function of that margin calculation, not a dial the trader sets, and it will look conservative next to what’s on offer elsewhere. 

The perpetual products described above currently let a trader pick their own leverage up to a platform-set ceiling: 20x at Kraken, 10x on Coinbase’s single names, and considerably higher on some Hyperliquid-hosted markets, with liquidation engines, auto-deleveraging, and insurance funds standing in for the margin calls, default management, and customer fund segregation that a DCM and its FCMs are built around. That’s not to say that Kraken and Coinbase will be able to offer leveraged perpetual futures to US customers, or that they will expand the perpetual product base beyond cryptos, but the mechanism is there.

Call the instrument whatever the rulebook calls it; that doesn’t change what’s actually changing hands. A contract with no expiration, no ownership of the underlying, and a periodic cash payment between counterparties to keep its price near a reference rate is the same basic architecture the SEC and CFTC have spent close to two decades keeping off US retail platforms under the CFD label. The CFTC’s May 29 order never used that term, and the contract it approved happened to be denominated in bitcoin rather than a single stock or a currency pair, but the structure underneath is the one regulators have held at arm’s length since Dodd-Frank, not a new one. 

Whether that distinction survives is now, quite literally, a question in front of a federal judge. None of it changes the practical reality for our readers today: it’s not available to a US-based client through a regulated channel in the first place, because none of the three platforms offering it will let a US person open an account. That’s a useful answer for clients who ask why they can trade NVDA on a crypto app from London but not from Chicago: it’s not that the product doesn’t exist, it’s that the structure offering it was built specifically to operate where US securities and derivatives law doesn’t reach, at least for now.

Sources & Additional Reading