Four Filings, One Regulator: The Race to Trade Apple Stock Like a Crypto Perp

What you need to know: the leveraged product that built crypto's biggest exchanges is now aimed at individual US stocks. OG.com has asked the CFTC for permission to list perpetual futures on single equities. Three other firms are already standing in line.

The filing

OG.com, the trading venue Crypto.com spun out earlier this year, filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to offer perpetual futures on individual US stocks. No expiry date. A funding rate that nudges the contract back toward spot. One contract, one ticker.

It's a familiar structure. BitMEX shipped the first crypto perpetual swap back in 2016, and the product went on to become the dominant instrument in digital assets. Perpetual swaps now clear well over $1 trillion in notional volume every month across the major venues. They're the reason offshore exchanges got big in the first place.

What's new is the target. Not Bitcoin. Apple. Tesla. Nvidia.

And OG.com isn't first through the door. Coinbase is in. Kalshi, which raised at a $5 billion valuation, is in. Payward, the parent company of Kraken, is in. Four applicants, one regulator, and a shared thesis that US retail is ready to trade equities with the use mechanics crypto traders take for granted.

See the pattern? Every one of these firms spent the last three years building derivatives muscle. Coinbase bought Deribit for $2.9 billion. Kraken picked up NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion. The next step was always going to be US-listed products that sit closer to the stock market.

Here's the gap they're all chasing. Offshore venues already let traders punt on tokenized versions of US equities with perp mechanics, and US retail has been locked out of every one of them. That's a market with demand and no legal supply. Not for much longer, if any of these four get their way.

What it actually means

Start with jurisdiction. This isn't an SEC filing. It's a CFTC filing, and that's the tell.

Crypto spent a decade asking the SEC for rules and mostly got enforcement instead. Derivatives regulators have been more willing to talk. So if perps on single stocks get approved, it happens through the commodity side of the house, not the securities side. That matters for everything that comes after it, including tokenized equities.

Now the market question. Who loses if this works?

Traditional brokers, for one. The ones still charging per-trade commissions on products with fixed hours and settlement delays. CME and its equity index complex, for another. A 23-hour futures session with quarterly expiries starts to look antique next to a product that never expires and settles continuously.

But the incumbents aren't asleep. CME has launched around-the-clock crypto futures. Nasdaq and NYSE parent ICE have both pushed into tokenized settlement pilots. The legacy players see the same demand curve these crypto firms do.

The real prize is liquidity, not novelty. Whoever gets approved first gets the order book. And order books are winner-take-most. Coinbase has the retail base, Kalshi has the prediction-market crowd, Kraken has the futures infrastructure, and OG.com has Crypto.com's distribution behind it. That's four credible shots at the same narrow window.

My take: this is a land grab dressed up as product innovation. The funding rate is the actual invention here, and it's been sitting in plain sight since 2016. It's a self-balancing mechanism that keeps a leveraged contract glued to spot without anyone rolling anything. Stocks have needed that for years, and nobody in the US could legally offer it.

Second take: the risk story is undersold. Funding rates punish crowded positioning, but they don't stop a retail trader from stacking 20x use into an earnings print at 11pm. The 0DTE options boom already showed how much appetite exists for short-dated gambling. Roughly half of S&P 500 index options volume now expires the same day. Do we really believe perps on single names will be traded more responsibly than that?

The honest answer is that regulators are weighing access against blowups, and the CFTC knows exactly what it's looking at. It has watched offshore venues run these products for nine years. That's the only reason a review is happening at all.

The takeaway

Watch the CFTC's docket, not the press releases. The first approval is the signal. Once one venue can list single-stock perps, the others get dragged along by competitive pressure, and the product goes from experiment to standard offering in about eighteen months.

The number that matters today: four. Four firms racing for one approval, in a market where the first mover takes most of the liquidity and everyone else scrapes.

And if it works, the follow-on is obvious. Tokenized equities with the same funding mechanics, trading around the clock, settling in stablecoins. That's the version of this that keeps exchange executives up at night, in a good way.

One thing to watch: whether any of these filings volunteer a use cap. If a venue asks for a 10x limit, it read the room. If nobody does, expect the CFTC to write one for them.