Stock Perps in Court: Is a Contract With No Expiry Date Still a Future?

On 3 November 2026, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission extended to individual US stocks the perpetual futures model it had opened for crypto about five months earlier, and it was sued the very same day. The Capital Markets Alliance, a newly formed New York trade association whose members, according to its spokesman, include Cboe, Citadel Securities and the Healthy Markets Association, filed a complaint in the Southern District of New York asking the court to vacate the approvals. Its argument is jurisdictional at heart: a derivative on a single stock that never expires is, it says, a security-based swap, a category Congress placed under the exclusive authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The complaint adds Administrative Procedure Act claims, alleging that the CFTC gave no explanation, ignored its own long-standing treatment of perpetual derivatives as swaps and failed to weigh the impact on investors. The CFTC answered that markets should be governed by law, not litigation campaigns. The case matters well beyond Wall Street, because CME Group has already brought a similar challenge against the crypto version.

In my view, the strongest part of the challenge is not the turf war but the reasoning point. Whatever one thinks of perps, an agency that reverses a settled classification must explain why; a product approval that rests on a silent change of position is vulnerable, however innovative the product may be. The weaker part is the assumption that labels can be fixed forever. Perpetual contracts combine features of futures and swaps, and I believe the honest answer is that existing categories were not drafted for instruments with no maturity; this is a gap for Congress or a joint SEC-CFTC rule, not for case-by-case litigation. The practical lesson for fintech founders and their lawyers is simple: a regulator's green light is not a safe harbour if its legal basis is contestable, so product design, disclosures and launch plans should be built to survive a court asking, first of all, which regulator was ever entitled to say yes!

Source: CoinDesk, 3 November 2026; Business Wire, 3 November 2026. Image: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.