Ondo Finance is making a direct appeal to America's two most powerful financial regulators, arguing that the United States does not need to rewrite its rulebook to accommodate perpetual futures tied to individual stocks — it just needs to apply the rules it already has. The tokenized real-world asset protocol has formally urged both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to establish a regulatory framework that would allow stock perpetual futures to operate legally on US soil, a move that could redirect a significant and fast-growing derivatives market back into the American financial system.
The core of Ondo's argument is both legally pragmatic and strategically pointed: existing US securities law, properly interpreted, can already accommodate perpetual futures contracts linked to individual equities. This is not a call for sweeping new legislation or a regulatory overhaul. It is a call for regulatory clarity and willingness — the suggestion that the tools are on the shelf, and that regulators need only pick them up. In a political environment where Washington has shown increasing appetite for pulling financial activity back within its borders, the timing of this appeal is deliberate.
What Are Stock Perpetuals and Why Do They Matter?
Perpetual futures — sometimes called "perps" — are derivative contracts with no expiration date, allowing traders to maintain leveraged exposure to an underlying asset indefinitely, subject to periodic funding rate payments. They have been a staple of the crypto derivatives market for years, accounting for the overwhelming majority of trading volume on major offshore exchanges. The innovation Ondo is pushing involves applying this same instrument structure to individual US equities — effectively creating crypto-native, perpetual leveraged exposure to stocks like Apple or Tesla without requiring direct ownership of the underlying shares.
The attraction for traders is obvious: perpetuals offer flexibility, capital efficiency, and round-the-clock access that traditional equity options markets do not. The attraction for the US regulatory establishment, in the current political climate, is equally legible. A thriving offshore market for products tied to American companies represents both a competitive disadvantage for domestic exchanges and a supervisory blind spot for regulators tasked with market integrity. If retail and institutional traders are accessing leveraged stock exposure through venues outside US jurisdiction, American watchdogs have limited visibility into those positions and their potential systemic effects.
A Regulatory Gap That Offshore Markets Have Exploited
The absence of a legal onshore pathway for stock perpetuals has not suppressed demand — it has simply routed that demand offshore, to platforms operating under lighter-touch regulatory regimes in jurisdictions beyond the SEC's and CFTC's direct reach. Offshore crypto exchanges have offered synthetic equity exposure for years, attracting US-adjacent traders who navigate around geographic restrictions with varying degrees of success. The result is a market that exists largely in a regulatory gray zone, with limited consumer protections and no formal integration into the US financial infrastructure.
Ondo's intervention reframes this not as a niche crypto issue but as a broader question of market competitiveness and regulatory coherence. The firm is effectively arguing that the status quo — where American investors access leveraged stock derivatives through offshore platforms while US regulators look on from the sidelines — is worse for everyone than a supervised, onshore alternative would be. It is the kind of argument that tends to resonate with regulators when the political winds favor domestic financial primacy, as they currently do.
The Tokenization Angle
Ondo's advocacy here is not abstract. The firm has been at the forefront of tokenizing real-world assets, including US equities, with infrastructure built partly on Solana. Bringing stock perpetuals onshore under a formal regulatory framework would directly expand the addressable market for tokenized financial products, aligning regulatory recognition with Ondo's existing product roadmap. The company has a clear commercial interest in this outcome, which does not diminish the validity of the legal argument but does explain the urgency with which it is being made.
The SEC and CFTC have historically been reluctant to sanction novel derivatives structures without explicit legislative backing, and jurisdictional questions between the two agencies — which body governs which type of contract — have complicated previous attempts to bring crypto-linked derivatives into the regulated perimeter. Ondo's position that current law already permits this structure sidesteps the legislative bottleneck, but it will still require both agencies to agree on a supervisory approach, a coordination challenge that has tripped up previous cross-agency financial innovation efforts.
What This Means
If the SEC and CFTC respond constructively to Ondo's appeal, the implications would extend well beyond a single product category. Onshoring stock perpetuals would validate the broader thesis that blockchain-native financial instruments can coexist with — and operate within — the established US regulatory framework, rather than around it. It would also give American exchanges and tokenization platforms a competitive foothold in a derivatives segment that has so far belonged entirely to offshore venues. The regulatory moment is arguably more favorable than it has been at any point in the past decade, with both agencies under pressure to modernize their approach to digital asset markets. Whether that pressure translates into the kind of coordinated action Ondo is requesting remains the central question — and the answer will say a great deal about how seriously Washington is taking the onshoring agenda it has publicly embraced.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Bitcoin News.