Kraken Opens US Crypto Perps, CFTC Clears Onshore Race, Sarvam AI Hits $1.5B

Crypto News

Kraken on Monday switched on perpetual futures trading for eligible US users, routing the products through Bitnomial, the federally regulated venue its parent company acquired in April. Available via Kraken Pro, the contracts span major assets including Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, Cardano, Chainlink, Dogecoin, Litecoin and Avalanche, and they share a single futures wallet with Kraken’s existing CME-listed products. Perpetual futures carry no expiry date and have historically migrated offshore; the exchange noted such contracts generated more than $60 trillion in global volume in 2025. The launch extends a year-long US buildout that already added CME futures support and, earlier this month, margin trading for qualifying domestic altcoin customers.

The move lands inside a wider regulatory thaw aimed at pulling derivatives onshore. On May 29, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual futures contract and issued a no-action position covering Coinbase, effectively clearing a path for compliant perpetuals in the domestic market. Kalshi launched its own contracts the same day, framing the step as its most consequential expansion beyond prediction markets and toward a full derivatives exchange. The approvals followed months of industry lobbying. These instruments, settled continuously rather than at a fixed date, mirror the mechanics traders previously accessed only through an offshore AMM or unregulated order book, now repackaged under federal oversight.

Coinbase moved on the same day, announcing that its Coinbase Financial Markets unit would give US institutional clients access to global crypto perpetual futures and options markets. The exchange said those venues account for roughly 80% of worldwide crypto trading volume, a figure that underscores how much activity has sat outside US jurisdiction. Institutional desks have long argued that fragmented access pushes liquidity abroad and complicates risk management for regulated firms. By channeling that flow through supervised infrastructure, the new framework targets the structural gap that left American participants dependent on overseas platforms, often paired with an AI trading bot or automated execution layer to manage round-the-clock perpetual exposure.

Away from derivatives, Indian startup Sarvam AI reached a reported $1.5 billion valuation after raising $234 million in the first close of its Series B, the highest reported Series B valuation in the country’s startup history. The round, led by HCLTech, is expected to total roughly $300 million. Sarvam builds large language models, speech tools, translation systems and AI agents tuned for Indian languages and local use cases, with a focus on voice-first interfaces, public services and enterprise deployments. The valuation positions the company at the center of India’s drive to develop domestic AI infrastructure rather than leaning on foreign models for sensitive economic and government workloads.

The raise crystallizes the sovereign AI thesis: the idea that a nation should retain greater control over the models, data, compute and AI services powering its economy. Investors and policymakers increasingly treat AI infrastructure as a strategic asset rather than ordinary software, a shift that elevates capital allocation toward locally governed systems. Sarvam’s bet is deliberately pragmatic, building tools that fit India’s languages, institutions and regulatory scale rather than chasing full technological independence. The company still relies on global chips, cloud providers and open-source research, but the funding signals conviction that domestic capability now carries geopolitical weight comparable to energy or telecommunications security.

That urgency intensified after Anthropic disabled its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all customers, citing US restrictions that barred access for foreign nationals, including some foreign-national employees. The episode illustrated how quickly availability of frontier AI can change when national security, export controls or policy pressure intervene. For governments weighing dependence on overseas providers, the disruption sharpened the case for sovereign alternatives that cannot be switched off by another country’s regulatory action. The lesson resonates well beyond India, feeding a global reassessment of where critical AI capacity should physically and legally reside as access becomes a lever of statecraft.

Viewed together, these developments trace a single arc: jurisdictions racing to repatriate strategic infrastructure, whether financial or computational, under domestic control. COINOTAG’s aggregate market data frames the backdrop, with the Fear & Greed Index at 20, signaling Extreme Fear, while Bitcoin dominance sits at 69.7% and total crypto market capitalization stands near $1.92 trillion. That elevated dominance reading shows capital concentrating in Bitcoin even as regulated US perpetuals expand the venues for leveraged exposure. The exchange’s own announcement and the CFTC’s approvals confirm the onshore pivot, while Sarvam’s investor disclosure and Anthropic’s shutdown crystallize a parallel sovereignty contest playing out across both markets and machine intelligence.