CFTC staff issued a no-action letter Friday enabling designated contract markets to convert existing perpetual-style digital commodity futures into true perpetual futures, the latest piece of regulatory plumbing in the agency's construction of a domestic crypto derivatives market.
The letter, release 9252-26, was announced via the CFTC's official X account. It allows DCMs holding perpetual-style contracts, which carry multi-year expiry dates rather than an open-ended structure, to relist them as true perpetuals without triggering full re-certification under Regulation 40.3. The practical effect is that exchanges already running the funding-rate mechanism on long-dated futures can drop the expiry and migrate open interest into the genuine perpetual structure the CFTC approved in May.
A true perpetual futures contract has no expiry. Instead of converging on a settlement date, it uses a periodic funding rate, typically paid between long and short holders, to keep the contract price anchored to the spot price of the underlying asset. Perpetual-style futures, the workaround US venues had used since at least December 2025, mimic that economic function through a long-dated cash-settled contract, usually with a 10-year maturity and a daily funding adjustment.
