Coinbase Derivatives filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Friday for approval to list single-stock perpetual futures for US traders. The proposed contracts would give American customers round-the-clock weekday exposure to individual equities without owning the underlying shares, and without the fixed expiration dates that define traditional futures.
An initial lineup would cover roughly 50 to 60 US stocks, with Apple named as the representative contract in the filing. Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia are among the companies reported to be included, according to Coin360. The products remain pending regulatory approval rather than cleared for trading, and Coinbase described the application as covering its first set of US single-stock perpetuals.
How the contracts would work
Perpetual futures are the dominant instrument in crypto trading but have never been offered on individual US stocks under US regulation. The contracts track the price of an underlying asset continuously, with periodic funding payments between long and short holders keeping the futures price anchored to the spot market. Traders can hold long or short positions indefinitely instead of rolling contracts at expiry.
Under the proposal, US traders would get 24/5 exposure, meaning the contracts would trade around the clock on weekdays. That is a wider window than regular equity markets offer and closer to how crypto perps already trade on Coinbase’s own exchange. The filing classifies the products as single-stock futures, a category that sits at the intersection of securities and derivatives law.
That dual character explains the second filing. Coinbase filed Form 1-N with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 1 to register as a national securities exchange for security futures products, a prerequisite for offering stock-linked futures in the United States. Single-stock futures have existed in American markets since the early 2000s but never found a large audience, traded on a handful of venues with thin volume. Coinbase’s pitch is that crypto-style market mechanics, continuous trading and funding-rate anchoring, can change that.
Building on an existing playbook
Coinbase is not starting from zero. The exchange launched equity perpetual futures for eligible non-US customers in March 2026, with contracts tracking major US stocks and indexes including Apple and Nvidia. Earlier this year it also became the first US exchange cleared to offer regulated crypto perpetual futures, later rolling out crypto contracts with leverage of up to 50x, per Gate News. The offshore equity perps gave the company a live dataset on demand, funding behavior and risk management for stock-linked contracts before it approached US regulators.
The timing follows a busy week for tokenized-equity news. The SEC announced a five-year conditional exemption allowing tokenized representations of US stocks to trade onchain through permissioned automated market makers, a framework that sent tokenization-linked tokens higher and lifted Coinbase shares nearly 12% on Thursday as investors rewarded the regulatory momentum. The London Stock Exchange Group separately outlined its own 24/5 trading and tokenized equity plans this week, working with Kraken and HSBC on a digital securities depository.
Competitors are moving on parallel tracks. Coinbase itself sought SEC permission earlier this month to list 24/7 equity perpetuals, and the CME Group faces a lawsuit over its own perps-style products that is heading to court. Crypto exchanges including Bybit and Binance have pushed 24/7 equity and FX derivatives to international customers through the year, with Bybit launching round-the-clock options on SpaceX and Nvidia exposure and Binance opening forex perpetual futures with weekend trading and up to 100x leverage.
What approval would mean
If the CFTC clears the filing, US traders would gain a leveraged, always-on way to take positions on individual stocks without margin accounts at traditional brokers. That would put Coinbase in more direct competition with both futures brokers and the crypto-native exchanges that already offer stock perps offshore. It would also extend the exchange’s strategy of becoming what its leadership has called an everything exchange, one venue for spot crypto, derivatives, tokenized assets and now equity derivatives.
Market structure questions remain. Perpetual funding rates on stocks would behave differently than on crypto, where the underlying trades continuously. When the equity market closes overnight, the perp would keep trading with no spot reference, which raises questions about how funding would be calculated and how price discovery would work during closed hours. Coinbase has operational answers from its offshore book, but US regulators will want to see how those mechanics hold up under American market rules.
The regulatory path is not guaranteed. Single-stock futures touch both the CFTC’s and the SEC’s jurisdiction, which means two agencies have to be comfortable with the structure. Coinbase’s Form 1-N registration is a sign the company has been preparing the ground for months rather than days, and the SEC’s recent tokenized-stock exemption suggests a friendlier posture toward merging crypto and equity market structure than in prior years. Even so, the CFTC’s review timeline is its own, and derivatives filings of this kind have historically taken longer than the industry would like.
A launch later in 2026 is reportedly the target if approval comes through. The filing lands amid a broader push by regulated US platforms to merge crypto-style market structure with traditional assets, from tokenized funds to round-the-clock trading. Whether the CFTC moves at that pace is the open question, but Coinbase has now put a concrete application in front of it, with Apple as the test case and the largest names in tech lined up behind it.