Morning Minute: CFTC Clears Stock Perps, Gets Sued the Same Day

Crypto majors green after Dems sweep midterms; BTC at $78.3k

Crypto's $64M campaign against Sherrod Brown fails, several pro-crypto candidates lose

Binance traced its $6.3B hack to a fake job interview & bad software download

CFTC clears U.S. equity perps for trading; Citadel & others sue to stop it

Circle reports earnings, revenue up 17% yoy (CRCL -3% premarket)

⚖️ CFTC Clears Stock Perps, Gets Sued the Same Day

A perpetual future is a leveraged bet on a price that never expires. You hold it as long as you can meet margin and keep paying a funding rate. It's analog product would be options in TradFi, with a few differences (primarily no expiration date). Crypto traders have used them for years, mostly on offshore venues like Binance and onchain platforms like Hyperliquid, because U.S. law had no clear home for the product.

On Tuesday the CFTC said Americans can now trade them on individual stocks.

Hours later, Wall Street sued to stop it.

The approval came as a statement from CFTC Chairman Michael Selig. Equity perpetual futures are now tradable on CFTC-registered exchanges, classified as security futures products under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which puts them under joint CFTC and SEC oversight.

The list of venues that can actually do this is short, and it was assembled quietly. A firm needs to be a CFTC-designated contract market and separately notice-registered with the SEC as a national securities exchange for security futures products. Seven entities hold both today: Cboe, CME, Coinbase, Kalshi, Bitnomial, Nadex, and ICE Futures U.S. Five of those seven filed inside a single 30-day window in September.

Kalshi is furthest along, with a filing covering 56 to 58 names and a launch expected within days. Coinbase has filed to list perps on Apple, Tesla and Nvidia. So those two are immediate winners. But Hyperliquid and Lighter, the top crypto perps protocols, are next in line for potential CFTC approvals and are likely future winners as well (LIT +10% on the day).

Then came the lawsuit. A new group called the Capital Markets Alliance filed in the Southern District of New York, naming Cboe, Citadel Securities and the Healthy Markets Association among its members. Its argument runs on two tracks.

First, that stock perps are securities-based swaps and belong to the SEC, not the CFTC.

Second, that the CFTC violated the Administrative Procedure Act by never explaining why it reversed an earlier position.

The group wants the policy eliminated. The American Securities Association piled on separately, pointing out that Congress banned selling security-based swaps to retail investors at all.

A CFTC spokesman called the suit "troubling," adding that "our markets should be governed by law, not litigation campaigns intended to block innovation." The CME already tried this once, suing over the CFTC's crypto perps approval on the theory that perpetuals are swaps rather than futures. That one went nowhere.

So where does that leave us?

Well, remember that old phrase: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

We're at the fight stage. Next stop, winning.

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors are green post-Midterms with ZEC leading; BTC +1.6% at $78.3k; ETH +2% at $2,320; SOL even at $93; HYPE even at $85; ZEC +9% at $1,285

LIT (+8%), VVV (+6%), RAY (+6%) and ENA (+5%) led top alt movers

Oil -3% at $95; Gold +3% at $4,054

Stock futures are green after the Democrat sweep; DOW +1.6%, Nasdaq +0.5%

Crypto's $64 million campaign against Sherrod Brown failed as he returns to the Senate, where he could land a committee leadership role with jurisdiction over the industry, capping a bruising night for crypto's political operation; pro-crypto House Republicans Bryan Steil, Zach Nunn and Ann Wagner lost their seats, while Pete Ricketts held Nebraska and Andy Barr won Kentucky's open Senate seat to replace Mitch McConnell

Circle reported third-quarter revenue and reserve income of $865 million, up 17% year over year, with average USDC circulation reaching $73.3 billion

Documentation platform GitBook disclosed a breach of its infrastructure credentials that it called "a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents," exposing API tokens, integration secrets and Git Sync keys

Justin Sun asked a federal court to sanction World Liberty Financial over a disclosure that initially listed the Trump-backed venture as a Florida company; Sun says the late amendment was a tactic to push his $45 million dispute out of federal court

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company holds "give or take 150,000 Bitcoin" at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, worth roughly $11.5 billion; the Q3 attestation accounts for $8.37 billion of Bitcoin, or about 100,100 coins, leaving some 50,000 unexplained

Ethereum privacy network Aztec shipped its Tierra upgrade, patching a critical vulnerability from the prior version and cutting client-side proof generation for private transactions to about one second

The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance said it won't recommend enforcement over Canton Coin's programmatic issuance, treating the token as a digital commodity in a no-action letter

Binance traced the $6.34 billion hack to a fake job interview in which an engineer was asked to download a coding assignment that installed malware its endpoint tools never flagged; attackers then spent weeks moving laterally, abusing an internal AI tool to take over two more employees' machines before reaching the wallet signing service on October 29

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

The Bitcoin ETFs saw $116M in net outflows on Tuesday; the ETH ETFs saw $85M in outflows

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE even, SHIB +1%, PEPE +4%, PENGU +3%, TRUMP -11%, SPX +4%, BONK +8%

Robinhood chain leaders were mostly green; Pons +8% to $147M; Cashcat even at $105M; AI +8% at $59M; Orbio +55% and Priors +40% led top movers

Solana top movers included AMD +35x, Choo +115%, and Ansem +13%; Stonk +9%

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Hyperliquid led onchain protocols in revenue with $2.07M, followed by Pump.fun with $1.57M

NEAR's House of Stake governance body voted to cut maximum annual token issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months, a 36% reduction in the rate

Stonk.fun introduced a new feature allowing new tokens to start at 20k mc and bond at 150k to enable deeper liquidity

Orbio relaunched from an AI credit marketplace into a private chat interface (and VVV competitor), offering 25 confidential models across Phala and NEAR alongside major commercial models priced below list

Robinhood and Arbitrum opened applications for the second cohort of the Arbitrum Mentorship Program, a 12-week track for teams building on Robinhood Chain that offers $100,000 in grants and a demo day; the pair have committed $1.8 million in total grants

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?