Payward, the parent company of Kraken, plans to offer onchain perpetual futures to American traders through Hyperliquid, with the trading routed through its CFTC-licensed Bitnomial exchange and clearinghouse. The announcement, made September 16, marks the first time a registered US exchange and clearinghouse would deploy a market on the decentralized derivatives protocol, which has until now operated entirely outside the American regulatory perimeter. Hyperliquid’s own terms have long barred US residents from its interface, so the deal reaches the protocol’s markets through regulated infrastructure instead. For traders used to choosing between offshore perps and dated CME contracts, a third category just opened.
The structure rests on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, which lets approved builders deploy their own permissioned perpetual markets on the protocol. Payward acquired Bitnomial, the Chicago-based crypto derivatives firm, on May 1, gaining a designated contract market, a derivatives clearing organization and a futures commission merchant in one deal initially valued at up to $550 million. Bitnomial acts as the CFTC-regulated deployer of the market and its clearer, while NinjaTrader Clearing, another Payward unit, handles client onboarding as the futures commission merchant. Payward now owns the complete American derivatives stack, something it spent seven years assembling through acquisitions in the UK, the EU and finally the US.
“Multiple venues run builder-deployed perpetuals on Hyperliquid. One holds 98 percent of their open interest, and no registered US exchange or clearinghouse has deployed a market there,” Payward said in its announcement. “This latest milestone shows how decentralized infrastructure can adapt to regulated markets,” said Calvin Leyon, Kraken’s head of onchain. The company added that it believes the framework can be replicated across other products and markets globally, and that partners already run their own products on Payward Services, its B2B infrastructure platform.
Why it matters
Hyperliquid dominates onchain derivatives. It processed more than $619 billion in trading volume in the first quarter of 2026, roughly 70 percent of all onchain perpetual futures activity, with a TVL around $4.2 billion. Its RWA-linked markets, including equity and index perps built on HIP-3, grew from about 2 percent of volume in January to nearly half by mid-year. None of that volume was reachable by American traders through the protocol directly. The Payward deal opens a slice of it under US supervision, though only selected markets and only through KYC channels.
For Payward, the move completes a derivatives build-out that started with a UK crypto futures license in 2019, added EU derivatives in 2025 and landed the Bitnomial stack this spring. Kraken began offering perpetual futures to eligible US clients through Bitnomial in June, letting customers use one collateral pool across perpetuals and other derivatives positions. The company reported 6.6 million funded accounts as of June 30 and said its proof of reserves, reviewed by an independent third-party accountant, showed client assets backed above 100 percent.
Timing matters here. The CFTC issued a no-action letter on September 17 allowing passive software providers, including wallets and apps, to connect users to registered derivatives exchanges without registering as brokers. The SEC introduced its Innovation Exemption for tokenized stock trading the same day. Both moves came after the Senate failed on September 15 to advance the Clarity Act, leaving the agencies to write market structure rules on their own. Payward’s plan fits squarely into that opening: an onchain market wrapped in registered entities, exactly the hybrid the CFTC letter anticipated.
The deal also lands amid strong token performance. Hyperliquid’s HYPE set an all-time high above $90 this week after the protocol launched manual borrowing of USDC and USDT against HYPE and bitcoin collateral, and the SEC granted the tokenized stock exemption. Coinbase, which filed with the CFTC to launch single-stock perpetual futures, and CME Group, which added crypto perpetuals to its lineup, have both pushed into the same regulated segment. Payward is not moving into an empty field, but it is the first to bring a decentralized protocol into the registered stack this way.
The limits are real. Bitnomial’s involvement gives American traders access through a supervised exchange, but it will not open Hyperliquid’s full selection of onchain markets to them. Users trade with KYC, under US derivatives rules, with a registered clearer standing behind the positions. That is a different product from self-custodial trading on the protocol itself, where no intermediary holds funds and the interface is closed to US residents. The two versions will coexist for different audiences, and the comparison between them will itself be a test of whether regulated wrappers cost too much in experience.
Hyperliquid’s policy arm has been making its own regulatory case. In an August 24 comment letter, the Hyperliquid Policy Center asked the SEC and CFTC to recognize qualifying cash-settled equity perpetuals as security futures, arguing that regulators should examine how a derivative is structured and traded before using its underlying asset to assign oversight. The Payward deployment is a quieter answer to the same question: bring the market into the registered perimeter and let regulators see it up close.
There is precedent to measure against. Coinbase launched CFTC-regulated perpetual-style futures in 2025 and has since filed for more than fifty single-stock perps. Kraken’s own June launch through Bitnomial gave it a working model for custody and clearing. What is new is the protocol layer: rather than building its own matching engine, Payward is pointing its licensed entities at an existing onchain order book. If it works, other exchanges face a choice between building regulated perps from scratch and licensing someone else’s liquidity.
A launch date was not given. Payward said Hyperliquid is the first protocol it plans to deploy on for US clients, with more products to follow through the same rails. If the framework works as described, the line between a decentralized exchange and a registered one gets harder to draw, which is precisely the point both sides are trying to prove.