Coinbase Files Stock Perpetuals Where OneChicago Failed

Coinbase Derivatives asked the CFTC on September 18 to approve cash-settled perpetual futures on individual U.S. stocks and ETFs. The exchange called the package the first U.S. single-stock perpetual futures and said it wanted 24/5 exposure with no expiry.

Dated single-stock futures already had a U.S. life, a funeral, and a comeback. OneChicago’s last session was September 18, 2020. CME listed new dated contracts on July 27. Coinbase is now trying to put crypto’s funding-rate machine on the same names, in a unit small enough to look like a crypto perp.

Coinbase Filed Apple as the Sample Contract

Chief Regulatory Officer Jane Downey signed Coinbase Derivatives Submission 2026-62 that Friday, a voluntary submission of equity perpetual contracts under CFTC Regulation 41.23(b). The letter says the exchange will list the contracts shortly after Commission approval, subject to any other clearances still required.

The public filing does not print a roster of tickers. It uses an AAPL Single Stock Perpetual Future as the representative spec and says the rest of the suite would follow the same structure on liquid U.S. equities and ETF shares that meet Rule 1203 listing standards. Coinbase has described a first group of more than 50 names, with Nvidia, Microsoft and Tesla among those discussed around the announcement.

THE SEPTEMBER 18 PACKET

• The filer: Coinbase Derivatives, LLC, a CFTC designated contract market, notice-registered with the SEC solely to trade security futures.
• The product class: Cash-settled perpetual futures on a single stock or ETF share, filed as security futures under joint CFTC and SEC jurisdiction.
• The sample: Apple, with a contract size of 0.01 times the AAPL index and a worked example notional of about $2.25.
• The next step: Commission approval, then any remaining sign-offs, before U.S. customers can trade.

Coinbase Derivatives and Coinbase Financial Markets had already filed a Form 1-N and a Form BD-N dated September 1, the notice papers that let a futures exchange and its broker sit in the security-futures lane. Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer, called those papers a first step and said CFTC product approval had to come next. “Equity perps have proven demand internationally, and we’re excited at the prospect of a regulated pathway for U.S. investors,” Shirzad said.

The corporate account put the claim in one line the same morning the CFTC letter went in.

Single stock perps are coming to America.

Coinbase has filed to list the first set of single stock perpetual futures in the US.

Building on the progress of our live US perps market, we’re working to bring liquid, 24/5 exposure to individual stocks in the US for the first time. pic.twitter.com/NPm14LK3UR

— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) September 18, 2026

These would not be shares. They would not carry votes or dividends. They would also not sit in a cash brokerage account by default. Downey’s letter says only futures commission merchants, introducing brokers and a short list of other registrants that live under suitability rules comparable to a national securities association may solicit or handle the orders. The path in is an FCM, not a spot-app buy button.

The Exchange That Died on This Calendar Date

U.S. law banned futures on single stocks for years under the old Shad-Johnson split between the CFTC and the SEC. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act, signed December 21, 2000, lifted that ban and put the new products under both agencies at once.

Two electronic exchanges opened on November 8, 2002. Nasdaq-LIFFE’s NQLX never found volume and suspended trading in 2004, handing what was left to OneChicago, the joint venture of CME, Cboe and, later, Interactive Brokers. OneChicago spent the next decade and a half trying to make security futures a business. The people who owned options pits had little reason to help a product that competed with those pits. Customer margin sat at 20% of notional, a compromise between futures-style risk models and the SEC’s credit rules, and it made the contracts clumsy next to stock options.

HOW SINGLE-STOCK FUTURES GOT TO A DEAD TAPE

1. December 21, 2000: The CFMA becomes law and legalizes U.S. futures on individual stocks.
2. November 8, 2002: OneChicago and NQLX open for trading.
3. 2004: NQLX suspends and moves leftover contracts to OneChicago.
4. September 18, 2020: OneChicago’s last session; 99.4% of open interest expires that day.
5. November 2020: The SEC and CFTC cut the joint customer margin floor to 15%, after the last exchange had already gone dark.
6. December 21, 2020: The CFTC vacates OneChicago’s contract-market designation.

The SEC later granted the firm’s request to withdraw as a national securities exchange for security futures, recording OneChicago’s last day of trading as September 18, 2020. Coinbase’s CFTC letter landed on that same calendar date in 2026, six years later. The filing does not mention OneChicago. The legal wrapper it uses is the one that exchange lived and died inside.

CME Already Sells Dated Contracts on the Same Names

The empty tape did not last. CME Group said on June 30 that it would list single-stock futures on July 27, covering more than 50 of the largest U.S. stocks, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Nvidia and SpaceX. The launch book is 55 larger-sized and 22 Micro-sized contracts.

Tim McCourt, CME’s global head of equities, FX and alternative products, sold the listing as a hedge tool, not a crypto import. “Clients want to manage equity price risk with more precision and with the capital efficiencies of a centralized marketplace,” McCourt said.

Those CME contracts expire. They roll. They already trade on Globex through the night with a daily maintenance break. Coinbase’s filing is 53 days after that launch, and it is aimed at a different habit: a position you do not have to roll because funding, not a calendar, is supposed to pin it to the cash price.

THREE WAYS TO HOLD A SINGLE NAME IN FUTURES

The comparison is the product. Coinbase is not reopening a pit that CME left empty. It is trying to sell a crypto-native contract on a name CME already put back on a screen, in a size that looks like a nano bitcoin future rather than a 100-share hedge.

How a $2.25 Apple Perpetual Would Trade

Appendix B of the CFTC packet walks through Apple as if the other names were photocopies. Product type is a USD-settled single-stock future. Underlying is AAPL. Contract size is 0.01 times the AAPL index. The worked tape shows a displayed price of $225.10 and a contract notional of about $2.25. Minimum tick is $0.01 per share, worth $0.0001 per contract. There is one listed contract: the perpetual. Daily settlement is 4:00 p.m. ET.

WHAT THE APPLE SAMPLE ACTUALLY SPECIFIES

• No expiry: One perpetual contract stays open as long as margin is met; there is no roll date in the spec.
• Cash only: Settlement is in dollars. No shares change hands at any point.
• Nano unit: 0.01 times the index, so the example notional is about $2.25 against a $225.10 print.
• Hourly funding: Longs pay shorts, or shorts pay longs, based on the gap to Coinbase’s stock index, capped at plus or minus 0.10% per hour.
• FCM access: Orders have to come through a futures intermediary that lives under suitability rules, not through an unregistered app flow.

That $2.25 unit is the tell. CME rebuilt single-stock futures for people who already think in 10-share and 100-share clips. Coinbase built a contract a crypto trader can click without translating share-count math.

Sunday Night Through Friday Evening

Trading would run from Sunday at 8:00 p.m. ET through Friday at 5:00 p.m. ET, the window Coinbase calls 24/5. The same window is the life of the reference index used for funding. The filing says there is no hour in which the contract trades without a live price for the stock, and no funding rate is published for any hour when the market is closed, paused or halted.

The index itself is Coinbase’s. Rule 1211 says each stock gets its own index, calculated once per second from direct institutional feeds across four sessions: pre-market from 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. ET, regular hours from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., after-hours from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and overnight from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Inputs are checked for freshness, outliers are dropped, and the rest are resolved on a median. If the feeds are too thin, the method falls back to a defined reference price.

That overnight sleeve is the part that will get people hurt if it is wrong. When the listed cash market is shut, funding, marks and liquidations still need a number. Coinbase is volunteering to manufacture that number from extended-hours and overnight prints. The design is honest about the problem. It does not make the overnight tape as thick as the 3:59 p.m. auction.

Hourly Funding in Place of an Expiry Date

A dated future converges because it expires. A perpetual has to fake that pull. Coinbase’s rate takes the difference between the futures mark and the stock index every three minutes, averages the 20 readings in an hour, scales that average by 24, then smooths it against the prior hour. The result is capped at plus or minus 0.10% per hour. If the contract sits above the index, longs pay shorts. If it sits below, the payment flips. Nodal Clear would bundle those amounts into the midday and end-of-day margin runs and post them as cash adjustments.

The filing’s own case for the product is that this drip of payments removes roll cost and roll-date basis risk. It also creates a new bill. A crowded long in Nvidia into an after-hours print can pay, every hour, to stay long. That is the crypto habit Coinbase wants to sell on Apple.

Nodal Clear Would Hold the Book

The Apple spec names Nodal Clear, LLC as the central counterparty. Nodal already clears Coinbase Derivatives’ crypto book and, from May 9, 2025, has offered clearing support for Coinbase Derivatives on a 24×7 cycle for selected bitcoin and ether futures. Stock perps would not trade through the weekend under the current spec. They would still need a clearer that already knows how to margin a book that does not sleep on a Chicago calendar.

Downey certified that dual trading would be restricted under Regulation 41.27, that the contracts are not readily subject to manipulation, and that the exchange has processes for coordinated surveillance, an audit trail, and regulatory halts keyed to the underlying stock. The letter also says there were no substantive opposing views to the proposal. That is a filing sentence, not a market test.

A 15% Floor Comes With the Security-Futures License

Because each contract is a future on a single security, Coinbase filed it as a security futures product. That puts the CFTC and the SEC on the same document. It also imports the customer margin rules in CFTC Regulations 41.43 through 41.48, the joint book that now sets a 15% floor on unhedged long or short security futures at CME.

The Contracts would bring equity perpetual derivatives within a U.S.-regulated framework for the first time, consistent with the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets recommendation that the CFTC and SEC permit eligible market participants to access derivatives, including perpetual contracts, through regulated intermediaries.

Coinbase Derivatives Submission 2026-62, letter to the CFTC

The May 29 Kalshi bitcoin perpetual order is the reason Coinbase can even make that argument. The Commission treated a no-expiry funding contract as a futures contract, then said in the June 3 policy statement (91 Fed. Reg. 33160) that perpetuals on equity securities should still go through case-by-case review with the SEC. Coinbase followed that map: listing standards in Submission 2026-61, then the Apple-sample suite in 2026-62, both as security futures, not as self-certified crypto lookalikes.

The 15% floor is the hangover from OneChicago. The old 20% rate helped starve that market. The agencies cut it to 15% in November 2020, after the doors were already locked. Coinbase’s crypto perps taught a generation of users a different leverage grammar. These stock contracts, if they list, will still be security futures. The funding rate can look like Binance. The margin rule will not.

North American Derivatives Exchange, the Crypto.com venue, filed its own Form 1-N on September 14, with that notice registration effective the day it went in. Kris Marszalek, Crypto.com’s chief executive, said the firm is working with the SEC and the CFTC on single-stock perps. Kalshi has been in the same corridor since the bitcoin order. The dual-review queue is no longer a Coinbase private road.

Kraken’s 10-Name Filing Landed the Same Afternoon

Payward, Kraken’s parent, posted the same date that it was filing exchange rules and product terms with the CFTC and the SEC through Bitnomial, the designated contract market it owns. The first intended book is perpetual futures tied to 10 U.S. stocks, with 24/5 hours as the goal and 24/7 described as a later ask. NinjaTrader Clearing is named as the FCM that would offer the security futures.

KRAKEN’S OPENING 10

• TSLA: Tesla
• SPCX: SpaceX-linked ticker in the Payward list
• NVDA: Nvidia
• AVGO: Broadcom
• MU: Micron
• AAPL: Apple
• MSFT: Microsoft
• AMZN: Amazon
• GOOGL: Alphabet
• PLTR: Palantir

The overlap with Coinbase’s sample and with CME’s July list is the point. Apple, Nvidia and Tesla are no longer a blank space in U.S. single-name futures. They are a three-way argument about expiry, size and which clearer holds the risk overnight.

Coinbase already sells a version of this idea to eligible customers outside the United States, and it already lists U.S. perpetual-style futures on thematic stock baskets. The September 18 letter is the attempt to put the single-name version inside the security-futures statute, on a Sunday-to-Friday clock, in a $2.25 Apple unit, six years after the last dedicated U.S. single-stock futures tape went silent. The CFTC has not approved it. Until it does, the dated CME contracts are the ones that actually trade.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a regulatory filing, related exchange history and competing product launches. It is informational only and is not investment, trading, tax or legal advice. It does not recommend buying, selling, holding or shorting any stock, future, perpetual contract or other derivative, and it does not tell any reader to use leverage or to open an account with a futures commission merchant. Speak with a licensed financial adviser and, if you intend to trade futures, a registered futures broker before acting on any product described here. Figures, contract terms and approval statuses come from the filings and statements cited and can change when the CFTC, the SEC or the exchanges act.