Washington Greenlit Single-Stock Perps on Nov. 3. A Judge Said They Look Like Swaps — Which Decides Who Holds the Margin

• Only one venue has listed single-stock perps so far: Kalshi's exchange, with more than 50 companies, contracts that never expire and settle in cash against the underlying share.
• Leverage on the onshore product is capped materially below offshore perp levels under CFTC rules, so it is not yet a like-for-like replacement for offshore flow.
• Kalshi's commercial template is explicit: no payment for order flow, a small published trading fee, and no requirement to hold the underlying stock.
• The CFTC let a 45-day objection window expire without intervening before the contracts took effect — the same clock that will govern any incumbent application.

• If the contracts are security futures: a CFTC-regulated designated contract market and its clearing house carry the guarantee, and the margin sits with the clearing firm or broker that clears for clients.
• If the contracts are swaps: SEC jurisdiction applies, the dealer of record changes, and the collateral moves onto broker-dealer balance sheets subject to different capital and client-protection rules.
• Either way the customer's cash sits somewhere, and whoever holds it earns the spread on it while the position stays open.

For too long, regulatory uncertainty left innovative products, such as security futures and equity perpetual futures, stranded in what SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins has aptly described as a regulatory 'no man's land' due to a lack of harmonization between the agencies.

• CME Group's clearing and guarantee business is the incumbent standard the CFTC's framework puts at risk, and CME sued the CFTC in June over digital-asset perps before joining the Nov. 3 challenge.
• Cboe Global Markets runs a futures venue and its own clearing, and is the plaintiff whose continuous-futures design the CFTC turned into precedent against it.
• Coinbase holds a CFTC approval for digital-asset perps and is one of only two venues named in the litigation over who may list them, yet its third-quarter revenue fell 35% year over year to $1.22 billion.

• Kalshi took the first onshore listings and set the commercial template: no payment for order flow, a small explicit fee, and CFTC-capped leverage below offshore levels.
• Interactive Brokers clears futures for clients and booked $1.15 billion of net interest income on $3.19 billion of third-quarter revenue — 36.1% of the top line comes from customer cash.
• Robinhood Markets earned $415 million of net interest income on $1.43 billion of third-quarter revenue, so collateral moving to fee-charging perp venues hits the same line.
• Citadel Securities, a member of the alliance, is the market maker whose hedging book would have to absorb synthetic single-stock exposure if the contracts keep trading.

• The case proceeds in the Southern District of New York with no restraining order in place, so single-stock perps keep trading while the classification is litigated.
• The 45-day CFTC review clock is the mechanism to watch: the same clock that let Kalshi's contracts take effect applies to any incumbent application.
• Kalshi's open interest and volume since the Nov. 5 launch are the numbers that decide whether this is a product or a demonstration; neither has been published.
• The January 2027 reporting cycle is where incumbent management teams will have to put a number on the risk, and where futures-segment commentary shows it first.

• If the CFTC prevails: onshore equity perps scale, and the incumbent that self-certifies fastest captures the category rather than conceding it.
• If the CFTC loses on classification: the contracts migrate to SEC-supervised swap structures and the margin moves onto broker-dealer and registered-clearing balance sheets under different capital rules.
• Watch for a joint CFTC-SEC rulemaking on security futures versus swaps; the March 2026 memorandum of understanding was groundwork, not a rule.
• Main risk to the thesis: the classification fight settles late, or the CFTC narrows or withdraws its approval while the offshore market keeps growing.

• Clearing: neither the CFTC's approval nor Kalshi's launch announcement names the entity that clears the single-stock perps or describes how customer collateral is held.
• Scale: no open-interest or volume figure for the single-stock perps has been published since the Nov. 5 launch, so the onshore book has no benchmark yet against the offshore turnover Kalshi cites at more than $4.5 trillion a year.
• Eligibility: the CFTC did not publish the list of venues that satisfy the dual-registration condition, so the competitive field beyond the first mover is unknown.