Ondo (ONDO) Urges SEC and CFTC to Onshore Stock Perpetuals After $8B Offshore Volume

Ondo's Aug. 24 Letters to the SEC and CFTC

Ondo Finance, the token behind one of the largest real-world asset platforms in crypto, has formally asked US securities and derivatives regulators to open the door to perpetual futures tied to individual stocks. Three comment letters filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Aug. 24 argue that the agencies can authorize stock perpetuals under the existing security futures framework — no new statutory category required. The core legal claim is narrow and technical: the statutory definition of a security futures product, Ondo's product-classification letter states, does not require a fixed expiration date. That matters because the absence of an expiry is the defining feature of a perpetual contract. Instead of settling on a set date, perpetuals use recurring funding payments between long and short holders that pull the contract price back toward the underlying share's reference price — a mechanism Ondo says performs the same economic function as expiration in a dated future.

The push is backed by a working product. Through a Panama-based affiliate, Ondo already offers stablecoin-settled perpetuals on individual US-listed stocks to eligible non-US users, and the platform had accumulated $8 billion in cumulative trading volume by Aug. 14 — roughly six weeks after launch — according to the company's SEC submission. Ondo points out that many of the referenced shares principally trade on US exchanges, even though American traders cannot access the offshore contracts. “Bringing that activity back to the U.S. should not be an open question,” the company wrote in its filing. Approval would not be automatic even if regulators agree with the classification: exchanges, brokers and clearing organizations would still need to satisfy registration, listing, margin and customer-protection requirements that apply to security futures. Alongside the derivatives proposal, Ondo's Ondo Stocks platform listed more than 440 tokenized stocks and ETFs across Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana as of Aug. 13, with roughly $1.02 billion in asset value, and RWA.xyz ranks the firm fourth among tokenized RWA managers with about $2.6 billion in distributed value.

A Parallel Bid From Hyperliquid's Policy Center

Ondo's letters did not arrive alone. On the same Aug. 24 date, the Hyperliquid Policy Center submitted its own proposal to both agencies, asking regulators to treat equity perpetuals with futures-like characteristics as security futures. The group said Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets had processed more than $480 billion in cumulative notional volume during their first 10 months. Under that framework, regulators would examine how a contract is structured and traded before considering the asset it tracks, placing a futures-style contract tied to an individual stock under the security futures system jointly administered by the SEC and CFTC — a CFTC-regulated designated contract market could list such products after notice-registering with the SEC, while a national securities exchange could use a parallel route. The political backdrop is moving in the same direction: President Donald Trump said in August that CFTC Chair Michael Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a “fully compliant and legal fashion,” and the HYPE token climbed more than 20% on the comments, gaining nearly 49% over the following month to trade around $81. The exchange infrastructure for high-leverage onchain derivatives is thus already built offshore; what is missing is a US legal pathway. Meanwhile, the SEC on Tuesday proposed modernizing its transfer-agent rules — most of which date from the late 1970s and early 1980s — with a 60-day public comment window and technology-neutral language, its second onchain market infrastructure review this year. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Rulemaking, Not Approval, Is the Next Test

Our reading of the primary documents tempers the headline optimism. Ondo's letters sit in the SEC's rule file S7-2026-21 as public comment submissions — they bind no one and propose no rule text, and neither agency has issued a proposal or set an effective date for stock perpetuals. What does carry formal weight is the memorandum of understanding the two agencies signed in March, which created a standing process for shared information and policy work on products straddling securities and commodities law. Former SEC counsel Ashley Ebersole told crypto.news that a US pathway for onchain perpetuals could take 10 to 12 months if full rulemaking is pursued — or less if regulators lean on existing authority. For Ondo, which recently shelved its own layer-1 chain plan to keep settlement on Ethereum, the $8 billion offshore figure is now its strongest argument in that process.