OG.com Submits Application for US Stock Perpetual Contracts to CFTC Following Coinbase, Kalshi, and Kraken's Parent Company Payward

Crypto Circle (120btc.cOM): Derivatives trading platform OG.com officially submitted a rule approval document to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Thursday, Beijing time, planning to prepare perpetual contracts linked to individual U.S. stocks. This innovative derivative allows investors to engage in long and short trading without holding the underlying stocks (such as Apple, Tesla, etc.) at any time. As an independent business line spun off from Crypto.com, OG.com becomes the fourth trading service provider to report individual stock perpetual contracts to U.S. regulators, following Coinbase, Kalshi, and Kraken's parent company Payward.

According to the submitted application documents, the proposed single stock futures contracts will adopt a cash settlement model, with the core advantage being the removal of fixed expiration date restrictions, and the trading window set to operate around the clock for five days a week (24/5). Such perpetual contracts were first introduced to the crypto market by BitMEX in 2016. Compared to traditional U.S. stock futures, which must be closed or rolled over in specific months, the design without a delivery date significantly reduces friction costs. This means retail investors can maintain trend positions on specific underlying assets for a long time, eliminating the redundancy of frequently rolling over contracts.

Splitting Giants and Capital Alliances

As a newly independent prediction market and derivatives service provider, OG.com has achieved a valuation of up to $5 billion since its spin-off from Crypto.com. Its co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek clarified the platform's strategic map at the early stage of the spin-off, planning to extend its business reach from prediction markets to futures and perpetual contracts. Shortly after operating independently, mainstream online brokerage Robinhood quickly invested in shares and reached a long-term strategic cooperation with OG.com, relying on the derivatives trading and clearinghouse license approved by the CFTC to handle related prediction market order flows.

This series of capital alliances has significantly enhanced the platform's compliance foundation. With the backing of existing licenses, its current strategic focus is merely to smoothly transition the list of tradable asset categories from early event predictions to individual U.S. stock assets.

Gradual Expansion of Derivatives Regulation

It is noteworthy to consider the macro timing of this application. On September 15, Beijing time, the highly anticipated comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets, the "Digital Asset Market Clarity Act" (CLARITY), encountered setbacks in procedural voting in the Senate. However, this legislative resistance has not hindered the substantial steps taken by frontline regulatory agencies.

A few days after this vote, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), under the public statement of relevant officials, allowed a limited exemption mechanism for on-chain U.S. stock token trading innovations. The CFTC, acting in tandem, also moderately relaxed the constraints on software providers, lowering the threshold for developers to connect users to regulated derivatives platforms. In fact, the CFTC's regulatory groundwork for perpetual contracts began to take shape as early as May of this year. That month, the commission established a case-by-case review mechanism for such contracts and approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual product for the first time; subsequently, in June, it introduced temporary exemption clauses allowing some compliant exchanges to smoothly convert existing periodic crypto futures into new contracts without delivery deadlines.

Crypto Platforms Targeting Traditional Brokerage Firms

After more than a decade of underlying technology iteration, crypto exchanges are attempting to replicate their mature models accumulated in the perpetual contract field to the traditional U.S. stock market. Following Coinbase's lead on September 18, Kalshi and Payward (via Bitnomial exchange) entered the fray, and now OG.com's application officially pushes this cross-border track into a four-way competition stage.

If the CFTC ultimately approves the above application, domestic U.S. investors will be able to seamlessly trade individual stock positions directly through crypto trading platforms, using crypto assets or fiat currency as the underlying margin. This new paradigm of reconstructing U.S. stock trading with crypto logic will directly pressure traditional brokerages like Robinhood and Webull, which focus on zero-commission trading. In comparison, the crypto ecosystem can offer broader trading hours, more flexible leverage ratios, and completely eliminate the cumbersome process of opening traditional securities accounts. Additionally, the traditional U.S. stock futures market will welcome a new influx of liquidity. Crypto perpetual contracts heavily rely on funding rate mechanisms to anchor spot prices; if this model is scaled into U.S. stock assets, it will undoubtedly create new pricing benchmarks and high-frequency arbitrage opportunities.