ICE to Bring Hyperliquid (HYPE) Perpetual Futures to US After $650B Trade.xyz Volume

ICE and Trade.xyz Plan US Venue

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, is partnering with Trade.xyz to build a regulated US market for perpetual futures on Hyperliquid infrastructure, pending approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The Hyperliquid (HYPE) price initially pushed toward $86 after the announcement, and our live monitoring shows the token up 7.7% over the past 24 hours; traders tracking levels can follow our Hyperliquid technical analysis. ICE is also taking a strategic equity stake in Trade.xyz, though the companies did not disclose the size of the investment, the ownership share ICE will receive, or when the planned market could begin operating.

Perpetual futures let traders bet on whether an asset's price will rise or fall without the contract ever expiring; they are heavily traded in crypto, but mostly on offshore venues that US investors cannot use. In its announcement, the companies' joint post on X described the project as an effort to bring those products into the American regulated derivatives market, saying innovation and the protections of US regulation “shouldn’t be a trade-off.” The venue would offer contracts tied to stocks, equity indexes, commodities, foreign exchange and crypto through participating brokers and trading platforms. Clearing, the back-end system that ensures trades settle, would be rebuilt for US customers, and the companies plan to introduce know-your-customer checks and anti-money-laundering controls while using Hyperliquid technology for continuous, around-the-clock trading.

@tradexyz · X post

Joint post on X.

View on X

Several points remain open. Neither company has named the registered exchange or clearing entity that would run the market, and the plan does not establish whether it would use an existing designated contract market license or seek new approvals. Trade.xyz will keep operating its existing Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets independently while the US business moves through the regulatory process, and it did not specify whether HYPE would serve as collateral or carry any additional role in the proposed market.

Payward's Separate US Proposal

Trade.xyz, the largest builder of markets on Hyperliquid, brings an established track record. Its markets have processed more than $650 billion in cumulative trading volume in just over a year, and data compiled by the Hyperliquid Research Collective shows $202.36 billion traded in the second quarter of 2026, with equity-linked contracts accounting for $58.9 billion of that. The platform provides continuous price exposure to traditional assets during hours when stock and futures exchanges are closed. On Tuesday, it launched NIFTY 50 perpetual futures tracking India's benchmark equity index, supporting margin trading with leverage of up to 20 times and settling profits and losses in USDC. Billionaire investor Stan Druckenmiller is among a small group of investors joining the ICE initiative, though individual commitments were not disclosed. For readers still weighing the platform, COINOTAG maintains a practical guide to trading on Hyperliquid.

ICE chief executive Jeffrey Sprecher had already signaled interest in the technology: in May he said the company had discussed blockchain-based perpetual futures with regulators and met Hyperliquid representatives to study the trading system.

The partnership is not the only US proposal on the table. On Monday, Hyperliquid outlined a plan from Kraken parent Payward under which its CFTC-regulated Bitnomial business would create and administer selected contracts on a permissioned version of HIP-3 infrastructure, with NinjaTrader Clearing maintaining customer accounts and participation restricted through approved access lists. As detailed in Payward's US perpetual futures plan, that structure names the regulated entities responsible for exchange operations, clearing and customer access, which the ICE announcement does not. The two proposals remain separate, and neither confirms that US customers can begin trading Hyperliquid-based contracts today.

What the Deal Leaves Unpriced

Our reading: the announcement pushes Hyperliquid's HIP-3 stack toward regulated US distribution rather than offshore-only contract trading, a shift that could eventually route American derivatives flow through the network's infrastructure. Two competing proposals in under a week suggest exchange operators see US perpetuals as the next competitive battleground, with Hyperliquid's rails as shared plumbing for both. But everything on the table is pending CFTC approval, and neither plan assigns HYPE a collateral or fee role, so the token's economics stay unchanged until contracts actually go live. The 7.7% price gain reflects positioning on that prospect, not confirmed volumes, and the first test comes when either venue discloses its launch path.