Cboe Explores Perpetual VIX Futures With No Contract Specs Filed Yet

Cboe Weighs a No-Expiry VIX Contract

Cboe Global Markets, the exchange operator behind the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX), is weighing the launch of perpetual futures on its own fear gauge. The VIX measures the 30-day volatility that S&P 500 options traders price in for the month ahead, and it spikes when demand for downside protection surges, which is why Wall Street calls it the market's fear gauge. For all its prominence, the index level itself has never had a spot market of its own: every VIX future listed today carries an expiry date. A perpetual contract removes that constraint. The structure uses a funding-rate mechanism that periodically exchanges payments between long and short positions, pulling the contract price toward the index level with no settlement day, which makes it, in theory, the closest proxy yet to trading the VIX on the spot.

The plan is at an early stage. No contract specifications have been published, no launch date has been set and no regulatory filing has been submitted. Cboe has said it will wait until US oversight of perpetual contracts becomes clearer before moving ahead, which puts the product's fate with regulators as much as with the exchange itself. The exploration also reflects a broader push by US venues to carry the high-leverage instrument that dominates crypto trading into other asset classes. Martin Lee, market insights lead at DWF Labs, argued that with a perpetual structure traders “don’t have to worry about expiries and decay” and can focus purely on direction, and he expects a strong wave of what he calls perp-ification across indexes, assets and metrics in the coming months.

From a 1993 Proposal to Crypto's Standard

The structure has a long intellectual pedigree. Economist Robert Shiller sketched perpetual futures in 1993, but it was the crypto industry that commercialized them, and funding-rate swaps are now the default instrument across major venues. Some crypto exchanges already list volatility products: Gate offers a VIX perpetual, though the book is highly illiquid with little visible volume, and Hyperliquid recently added futures tied to Volmex's bitcoin implied volatility index, extending the model to crypto-native gauges. The VIX itself already supports a large derivatives complex of futures, options and exchange-traded products, but every listed future expires, and rolling positions into the next contract is costly and weighs on returns, the same criticism that met Bitcoin futures ETFs when they debuted in late 2021. A no-expiry design would sidestep that, and a deeper market with more buyers, sellers and hedgers could pull the various VIX products into closer agreement on the index's implied level. The hard part is hedging. The VIX is a mathematical calculation, not an asset anyone can hold, so market makers cannot buy the spot to offset risk the way Bitcoin desks do. Analysts at Marex Solutions pressed exactly that point: the open question is how funding would anchor an index that cannot be bought as a cash asset, and removing expiry does not remove hedge costs or basis risk. Until contract terms exist, they called the idea a potential new volatility market, not a cheaper substitute for options convexity.

Regulatory Clarity Is the Gatekeeper

COINOTAG's read is that the convergence now runs both ways: crypto-derived market structure is shaping Wall Street product design rather than borrowing from it. Cboe's own framing makes regulatory clarity the gatekeeper, so until a filing with concrete contract terms appears, the VIX perpetual stays a proposal and Marex's basis-risk objection stands unanswered. The next concrete step to watch is any regulatory submission, which would turn this exploration into a formal product.