Overview Coinbase Derivatives asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on September 18 to approve a family of cash-settled perpetual futures referencing U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs. COIN shares Overview Coinbase Derivatives asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on September 18 to approve a family of cash-settled perpetual futures referencing U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs. COIN shares
Coinbase Stock Perpetual Futures Explained: How Equity Perps Differ From Tokenized Stocks
Overview
Coinbase Derivatives asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on September 18 to approve a family of cash-settled perpetual futures referencing U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs. COIN shares rose more than 11% that day. It is the first formal U.S. regulatory request to apply crypto's most developed derivatives structure to individual equities, and it has pushed a long-running definitional confusion into plain view.
Stock perpetual futures, tokenized stocks and actual shares can all display the ticker AAPL on a trading screen, yet they differ completely in legal character, in what rights they convey and in who the holder has a claim against. A perpetual future is a derivative that tracks a share price, and the holder owns nothing, receives no dividend and casts no vote. A tokenized stock is an on-chain representation whose rights depend entirely on how it was structured. An actual share is registered ownership. The Securities and Exchange Commission's Innovation Exemption, issued on September 17, wrote that boundary into a regulatory document and gives the market a clearer reference point than it had a month ago.
Key Takeaways
Coinbase filed an application, not a live product. The contract sits in the CFTC's product register with a pending status, and Coinbase's own wording describes work in progress rather than availability.
An equity perp is not a shareholding. The contracts settle in cash, no shares change hands, and the holder never appears on a company's register or receives dividends or voting materials.
Tokenized stocks travel a different route entirely. Under the SEC's Innovation Exemption, a qualifying tokenized stock must pass through the same dividends and voting rights as the underlying security, while synthetic products that only track price fall outside the relief.
The regulatory path runs through an old framework. Because each contract references a single stock, it counts as a security futures product under joint CFTC and SEC jurisdiction, a structure Congress built in 2000 that sits outside the current fight over whether perpetuals are futures or swaps.
The variables ahead are regulatory and judicial. The CFTC review, CME Group's lawsuit over how perpetuals should be classified, and the legislative vacuum left by the Clarity Act's failure in the Senate will shape how quickly any of this reaches U.S. traders.
Why Perpetual Futures Took Over Crypto Derivatives
Futures Without an Expiry
A conventional futures contract expires, which forces traders to roll positions forward and absorb the cost and slippage that comes with it. A perpetual future removes the expiry date, so a position can be held indefinitely. That makes it behave less like a term contract and more like a leveraged substitute for spot exposure.
The mechanism that keeps the price anchored is the funding rate. When the contract trades above the reference price, longs pay shorts; when it trades below, the flow reverses. Those periodic payments give arbitrageurs a reason to pull the contract back toward the underlying, which is how convergence happens without a settlement date. Crypto perpetuals on venues such as MEXC Futures run on exactly this logic: no expiry, funding-rate anchoring, long or short exposure, adjustable leverage.
Extending the Model to Equities
Apply that structure to a share price and you get an equity perpetual future, commonly shortened to an equity perp. The reference swaps from bitcoin to Apple or Nvidia while the machinery stays the same: no expiry, cash settlement, funding payments to track the stock.
Until now these products lived almost entirely outside the United States. Coinbase launched stock perpetual futures for eligible non-U.S. users on March 20, covering seven large-cap technology names alongside ETF perpetuals tracking the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100. According to The Block's coverage, single-name contracts carry up to 10x leverage and ETF contracts up to 20x, settle in USDC, and can be cross-margined against spot positions. The product was explicitly unavailable to U.S. persons.
The appeal is largely about time. U.S. equity markets keep defined sessions, yet earnings and major announcements from companies such as Apple and NVIDIA routinely land after the close, when conventional after-hours liquidity is thin and spreads are wide. A derivative that trades through nights and weekends fills exactly that gap.
What the Coinbase Filing Actually Proposes
The Request and the Representative Contract
According to Forbes, which reviewed the submission, the document is dated September 18, carries the reference Coinbase Derivatives Submission 2026-62, and is signed by the exchange's chief regulatory officer. It asks the commission to approve cash-settled contracts on the most liquid U.S.-listed equity securities and ETFs, using an Apple contract as the representative specification. Each Apple contract covers 0.01 of a share, roughly $2.25 of exposure at the $225.10 example price used in the filing, and would clear through Nodal Clear. The contracts carry no fixed expiration and would trade from Sunday through Friday.
The filing is notably deliberate about its regulatory route. Because each contract references one stock, it is classified as a security futures product under the joint jurisdiction of the CFTC and the SEC, a framework Congress established in 2000 that sits on a separate legal track from the current dispute over what perpetuals are.
Two Regulators, Two Steps
The CFTC request is the second half of the process. As reported from the public record, Coinbase Derivatives filed a Form 1-N with the SEC on September 1 to notice-register as a national securities exchange, and Coinbase Financial Markets filed a Form BD-N the same day as a security futures broker-dealer. Those filings cover the entity permissions; product approval from the CFTC covers the rest.
None of this is new ground for the company. Its fiscal 2024 annual report on Form 10-K describes a CFTC-regulated designated contract market acquired in 2022 and now operating as Coinbase Derivatives Exchange, and Bermuda Monetary Authority approval obtained in 2023 allowing Coinbase International Exchange to offer perpetual futures to eligible non-U.S. customers. The equity filing extends an existing licensing footprint rather than building one from scratch.
The Status Is Still Pending
This part is widely misread. A CryptoSlate check on September 22 found the CFTC product register still listing the single-stock perpetual futures contract as pending approval, and Coinbase's own posts described a filing and an intention to bring the product to the United States, which is prospective language. Until the review concludes and final contract terms are published, the document describes a proposed product rather than a tradable one.
What Cash Settlement Does and Does Not Mean
The Settlement Is a Price Difference
Cash settlement means the contract resolves through a payment of the price difference rather than delivery of the asset. For a perpetual with no expiry, the more accurate description is continuous profit and loss settlement: the contract's value moves with the referenced share price, and gains or losses post to the account in cash. At no point in that chain does a share change hands.
One consequence follows directly. The counterparty does not need to hold the stock, and the trader never becomes a shareholder by virtue of holding the position. The contract is a price agreement and nothing more.
Dividends and Voting Rights Do Not Pass Through
This is the sharpest of the three distinctions. A perpetual futures holder receives no dividend and no proxy materials. That is not a platform choice but a structural fact: dividends and voting rights attach to share ownership, and a derivatives holder never acquires ownership.
Dividends show up indirectly, through price. A stock adjusts on its ex-dividend date, the reference index moves with it, and the contract price reflects that move. Economically that is not the same event as receiving a cash distribution, and it differs in tax treatment, cash flow and legal character. Anyone holding a position across an ex-dividend date should understand they are exposed to a price adjustment, not receiving a payout.
Leverage Cuts Both Ways
Leverage is usually marketed as the feature, but it magnifies losses exactly as much as gains. With a single stock as the reference, event-driven gap risk from earnings, regulatory action or product news is amplified accordingly. Crypto traders are accustomed to violent overnight and weekend moves, yet applying the same leverage settings to an individual name that can gap by double digits after the close produces a different risk profile than it does on a major crypto pair.
Three Products That Are Not Interchangeable
Actual Shares
An actual share is registered ownership. The holder is a shareholder with dividend entitlement, voting rights and a residual claim in liquidation, held through regulated brokerage and clearing infrastructure. Of the three, it carries the most complete set of rights and the most conventional structure.
MEXC's RealStocks sits in this category. According to MEXC's product announcement, the product works through a partnership with a regulated securities broker and lets eligible users buy and hold genuine U.S.-listed equities, with dividend eligibility where applicable. For an investor who wants to hold as a shareholder, that path answers a different question from the one a perpetual future answers.
Tokenized Stocks
A tokenized stock maps an equity interest onto a blockchain. The question that matters is what gets mapped: the full bundle of shareholder rights, or price exposure alone.
A CryptoSlate analysis notes that documentation for some leading stock-token products states plainly that holders do not receive the underlying voting rights, and that the economic value of dividends is reflected by adjusting effective holdings rather than paying cash. Products built that way trade like equities while functioning, in rights terms, more like a claim on an issuer than a claim on the listed company being referenced.
The SEC wrote that distinction into a regulatory document on September 17. Its press release describes temporary, conditional relief allowing Tokenized Securities Venues to trade tokenized National Market System stock through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools without registering as a national securities exchange. Skadden's summary notes the relief runs for five years from September 17, 2026, unless the Commission extends it or adopts permanent rules.
The conditions are where the line gets drawn. Sidley's analysis lists requirements including economic and voting rights identical to the underlying shares, issuer notice and objection, public transaction data, coordinated trading halts, symbol and volume caps, and a prohibition on leverage. CoinDesk reported that synthetic products which merely track a price without conveying equivalent rights do not qualify.
In short, the regulatory bar for calling something a tokenized stock and trading it onshore now includes actually passing the rights through.
Stock Perpetual Futures
Perpetuals sit at the other end. They are neither ownership nor a representation of ownership but a derivatives contract referencing a share price. The Innovation Exemption's prohibition on leverage applies to tokenized stocks, while leverage is the central feature of a perpetual, which by itself indicates the two products live in different regulatory frameworks.
A MEXC product comparison describes tokenized stocks as an on-chain shadow of equities, convenient and composable but incomplete in rights, while stock futures are perpetual contracts based on individual stocks or indices. That taxonomy applies cleanly to the Coinbase filing: what it seeks to list is the third category, not the first two.
The most practical test for an investor is three questions. Will my name appear on the shareholder register, will I receive dividends and proxy materials, and is my claim against the listed company, a token issuer or a contract counterparty. The three answers together identify which product is actually in hand.
To see how funding rates, leverage and two-sided positioning behave in practice, work through the mechanics on the MEXC derivatives market before deciding on position size
The Regulatory Structure and What Comes Next
Why the Security Futures Route
The central legal question about perpetuals in the United States is whether they are futures or swaps. Forbes reports that the CFTC approved the country's first bitcoin perpetual on May 29, and that CME Group's Chicago Mercantile Exchange sued the agency and its chairman on June 18, arguing that contracts with no expiry and funding payments are swaps rather than futures and that the agency had ushered new competitors into its retail futures market. The CFTC moved to dismiss in September.
The Coinbase filing sidesteps that fight by design. Classified as a security futures product, the contract falls under a separate statutory framework, and the submission argues this is precisely the listing path the commission has directed for perpetual contracts on equity securities. As legal strategy, it is a clear choice.
A Legislative Vacuum Filled by Agency Action
The sequence tells the story. The Senate's procedural vote on the Clarity Act failed on September 15, which CNBC described as a major setback for the industry's push for a comprehensive market structure framework. Two days later the SEC used existing authority to issue the Innovation Exemption, with CNBC noting that token holders must retain the rights they would have with traditional stock and that companies can object to their securities being tokenized. The day after that, Coinbase filed.
Three events in five days point to the same conclusion. With Congress unable to supply a statutory framework, agencies are opening narrow, conditional pathways with the tools they already have, and market participants are queuing up on those pathways. The approach moves quickly, but every route it creates is temporary and comes with conditions attached.
What to Track
The most immediate marker is the CFTC review itself, since the product register's status will signal the outcome first. Next is the CME litigation, because a substantive judicial ruling on how perpetuals should be classified would reach well beyond any single product. Third is the comment process on the Innovation Exemption, since the Commission requested comment alongside the order, which means the five-year framework could eventually give way to permanent rules. Finally there is competition, as other venues have signaled similar ambitions, and the number of approved products and the variation in their terms will shape what this market looks like.
Risks and Scenarios
In an approval scenario, the CFTC clears the filing and the first regulated single-stock perpetuals appear onshore. That would pull some demand back from offshore and on-chain venues into supervised infrastructure with central clearing, while also putting a high-leverage product in front of a much broader retail base, which regulators would likely address through suitability requirements and leverage caps.
In a delay scenario, the review stretches out over classification or suitability concerns and nothing lists. Offshore and on-chain venues continue to absorb the demand, and U.S. users stay walled off from the market.
In an adverse scenario, a court or regulator rules against the current treatment of perpetuals and the category has to be restructured. That outcome looks less likely, but its reach would be the widest.
Across all three, the judgment an individual investor needs to make starts with the objective rather than the product. Anyone holding for the long term and wanting shareholder rights cannot substitute a derivative for a share. Anyone hedging an existing position through nights and weekends gets time coverage from a perpetual that conventional channels do not provide, at the cost of funding payments and leverage risk. Matching the tool to the objective matters more than being early to a new instrument.
Exclusive View from James Mitchell
For James Mitchell, the significance of the filing is not whether Apple can be traded on a Sunday. It is that a crypto-native product structure has, for the first time, entered the U.S. security futures framework through a formal application. The perpetual future is one of the few genuine pieces of financial engineering the crypto industry has produced, with funding rates solving the problem of price convergence in the absence of a settlement date. Applying that mechanism to equities and seeking approval through an existing securities regime tests a larger proposition: whether traditional market regulation can accommodate crypto's product design.
Two misreadings are likely. The first is treating a filing as a launch. The product register still shows pending status, and until approval is published, any specific claim about trading hours, leverage limits or eligible underliers rests on a proposal rather than a rulebook. The second is collapsing the three product types into one. From a risk management standpoint, actual shares, tokenized stocks and perpetual futures carry different counterparty exposures, different rights and different settlement paths, and sizing them inside a single framework understates what is actually at risk. The SEC's decision to require rights pass-through and prohibit leverage for tokenized stocks under the exemption is itself evidence that regulators consider this line essential.
Three observable variables deserve the most attention. The first is the CFTC product status and the final contract terms, particularly leverage caps and suitability requirements, which determine the real risk profile. The second is the historical level of funding rates, because on an equity perpetual the funding rate is the core holding cost, and a persistently positive rate makes a long position decay over time, which inverts the cost structure of owning the share itself. The third is the outcome of the CME litigation, which bears on the legal character of the entire perpetual category in the United States.
Seen across assets, there is an interesting tension between these two developments. The Innovation Exemption pushes tokenization toward completeness, insisting that dividends and votes pass through, which moves on-chain assets closer to real securities. The perpetual moves in the opposite direction, stripping every right away and keeping only price exposure and leverage. Both are advancing at once, which suggests the market wants two different things from proximity to equities: one group wants ownership, the other wants trading efficiency. What is worth watching over the coming years is whether those two paths settle into separate markets or converge again somewhere downstream.
FAQ
Can I trade Coinbase stock perpetual futures today?
Not in the United States. Coinbase Derivatives filed with the CFTC on September 18, and as of late September the contract remained listed as pending approval in the CFTC's product register. Coinbase has offered stock perpetual futures to eligible non-U.S. users since March, but that product is explicitly unavailable to U.S. persons. Until review concludes and final terms are published, the specifications exist only in the application.
Does holding a stock perpetual future mean owning the stock?
No. A stock perpetual future is a derivatives contract referencing a share price, settled in cash, with no delivery of shares at any point. The holder never appears on a company's shareholder register and holds no shareholder status. Rights come from the contract terms rather than the corporate charter, and the claim runs against the counterparty and clearing house, not the listed company.
Do equity perps pay dividends or carry voting rights?
No. Dividends and voting rights attach to share ownership, which a derivatives holder never acquires, so neither passes through. Dividends appear only indirectly through price, since a stock adjusts on its ex-dividend date and the reference index moves with it. That is a different event from receiving a cash distribution, in tax treatment and in legal character alike.
How do tokenized stocks differ from stock perpetual futures?
A tokenized stock maps an equity interest onto a blockchain, and how complete the rights are depends on the issuance structure. Under the SEC's Innovation Exemption, a qualifying tokenized stock must convey the same economic and voting rights as the underlying shares, and leverage is prohibited. A perpetual future maps no ownership at all and offers leveraged price exposure, which places the two in separate regulatory categories.
What does cash-settled mean?
Cash settlement means the contract resolves through payment of a price difference rather than delivery of the underlying asset. For a perpetual with no expiry, it is better described as continuous profit and loss settlement, with the contract's value moving alongside the reference price and gains or losses posting in cash. This is also the technical reason a holder never becomes a shareholder: no share moves anywhere in the chain.
What role does the funding rate play in an equity perp?
The funding rate keeps the contract anchored to the reference price. When the contract trades above the underlying, longs pay shorts, and the flow reverses when it trades below. Because there is no expiry to force convergence, funding is the only anchoring mechanism, and it also represents a carrying cost. Persistently positive funding means a long position decays over time, which matters when assessing any long-horizon strategy.
Why are these contracts overseen by both the CFTC and the SEC?
Because each contract references a single stock, it is classified as a security futures product, a category that has fallen under joint jurisdiction since Congress built the framework in 2000. Coinbase cited that path explicitly in its submission, and on September 1 filed a Form 1-N and a Form BD-N to complete the entity-level notice registrations that the framework requires.
Which product suits a long-term holder who wants shareholder rights?
Actual shares. Perpetual futures convey no shareholder rights at all, and the completeness of a tokenized stock's rights depends on how it was issued. An investor who wants to hold as a shareholder with dividend entitlement needs to buy real shares through a regulated brokerage channel. Derivatives are better suited to directional trading and short-term hedging of existing positions, which is a different problem.
Disclaimer
The information above is provided for general market information and analysis only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice or a recommendation to trade. Prices of crypto assets, equities, derivatives and other related financial instruments can fluctuate sharply, leveraged products magnify losses as readily as gains, and past performance, technical indicators and on-chain data do not guarantee future results. The regulatory filings, approval statuses, product terms and market data referenced may change at any time, and the latest official disclosures from the relevant regulators and platforms should be treated as authoritative. Availability and eligibility for derivatives and tokenized securities differ across jurisdictions. Readers should conduct their own research and make decisions based on their own financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, consulting a qualified professional where appropriate. The MEXC Crypto Pulse team accepts no liability for any direct or indirect loss arising from the use of this information.
About the Author
James Mitchell specializes in technical analysis, market trends, and trading strategies for both Bitcoin and altcoins. Based in London, he has over 10 years of experience in financial markets. Before joining MEXC Learn, James worked as a senior analyst at a leading European investment firm, where he developed expertise in risk management and quantitative trading. His transition to cryptocurrency markets began in 2017, and he has since become recognized for his data-driven approach. He holds a Master's degree in Financial Economics from the London School of Economics. His analytical approach combines traditional technical analysis with on-chain metrics to provide readers with actionable insights.
His areas of expertise span technical analysis, market trends and cycles, trading strategies, Bitcoin and altcoin analysis, and risk management.
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The articles shared on this page are sourced from public platforms and are provided for reference only. They do not represent the position or views of MEXC. All rights belong to James Mitchell. If you believe any content infringes upon the rights of a third party, please contact service@support.mexc.com for prompt removal. MEXC does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any content and is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided. The content does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, nor should it be interpreted as a recommendation or endorsement by MEXC. For expert insights and in-depth analysis, visit MEXC Learn.
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