For years, perpetual futures, the most popular trading instrument in crypto, existed in a regulatory no-man’s-land. American traders either pretended they lived somewhere else or simply sat on the sidelines while offshore exchanges processed trillions in volume. That era appears to be ending.
On May 29, the CFTC approved Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract, making it the first true Bitcoin-referenced perpetual futures product listed on a regulated US designated contract market. The response was immediate: trading volume topped $100 million in the first 24 hours and surpassed $1 billion within the opening week.
The $90 trillion elephant in the room
In 2025, offshore perpetual futures platforms processed over $90 trillion in annual volume. To put that in perspective, that figure more than tripled from $28 trillion just two years earlier in 2023. All of that activity happened outside US regulatory oversight, on platforms like Binance, Bybit, and OKX.
CFTC Chairman Mike Selig framed the approval as “a major step towards making America the crypto capital of the world.”
