Judge Lets Kalshi Stock Perps Trade at 4.9x as Bitcoin (BTC) Perp Model Faces Test

Caproni Denies the Halt, Keeps Approvals

A federal judge has let perpetual futures on individual stocks keep trading on Kalshi, Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial, denying an emergency halt on Tuesday, Nov. 3 while finding the Wall Street-backed challengers likely to prove that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) overstepped its authority. A stock perpetual is a leveraged, non-expiring derivative that tracks one listed equity, and crypto venues have used the CFTC's framework to bring the instrument, the core product of crypto derivatives trading, onshore. The challenge came from the Capital Markets Alliance Association, a New York nonprofit whose members include Cboe Global Markets, Citadel Securities and the Healthy Markets Association, which sued the agency and Chairman Michael Selig in the Southern District of New York, case No. 1:26-cv-09608. Judge Valerie Caproni wrote that the group is “likely to succeed on the merits,” because contracts with no expiration never provide for a “sale for future delivery” of a security, so they cannot be security futures under CFTC authority and instead appear to satisfy the definition of a swap, which falls to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). She weighed the balance of equities toward the alliance and called the agency's actions a major disruption to the equities market, but refused the halt because the members' declarations of harm were conjectural and showed no injury that was actual and imminent. The approvals came through a deemed-approval route under Commission Regulation 40.3: the exchanges filed on Sept. 18 and the 45-day review window lapsed without a written order, as Chairman Selig described in a Nov. 3 statement. By Wednesday morning Kalshi listed four single-stock perps on Qualcomm, McDonald's, Amgen and Costco, with maximum leverage of 4.9x. The CFTC's opposition is due Friday, Nov. 6 and the alliance's reply Tuesday, Nov. 10, with Judge Lorna G. Schofield assigned to the case.

56 Companies Object to OKX Tokenized Stock Plans

A second front has opened over a different route for carrying U.S. equities onto crypto rails. Tesla and SpaceX have lodged objections to tokenized stock trading plans by crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the operator of the New York Stock Exchange, bringing the total number of objecting companies to 56. A tokenized stock is a blockchain representation of an equity share, and such plans would let crypto-platform users take exposure to listed U.S. companies without a brokerage account. Offshore venues already serve that demand, and products such as Bitget Stock Futures let crypto traders access U.S. equities from derivatives accounts. The objections sit in the same legal territory as the New York lawsuit: both target structures that carry equities outside the traditional securities wrapper, and both turn on whether the SEC or the CFTC holds jurisdiction. The difference is the venue and the form. The perps now trading were approved on CFTC-regulated U.S. derivatives exchanges, while the OKX and ICE plans would record equity exposure on tokenized rails. Tesla and SpaceX are the most recognizable names among the 56 objectors, and their intervention puts corporate issuers, not only exchange operators and market makers, on record against equity products built for crypto platforms.

The two fights share one question: what a non-expiring equity contract is, and who may approve it. Caproni's order keeps equity perps live only until the merits are decided, and her reasoning, that a contract without expiration looks like a swap under SEC jurisdiction, runs parallel to the logic behind the 56 objections to tokenized equity plans. The precedent reaches crypto itself. The CFTC approved the first U.S.-listed Bitcoin (BTC) perpetual on May 29, and Kalshi went live with the product soon after; CME Group then sued the agency in June, arguing that a bitcoin contract built on exchanged funding payments is a swap, not a future. A federal judge in New York has now endorsed, at least preliminarily, the core of that argument for stock contracts. With the CFTC's opposition due Friday, Nov. 6, the label a derivative carries, future or swap, will decide which regulator oversees it and how much retail access survives.