For years, American crypto traders who wanted to hold leveraged positions indefinitely had one option: go offshore. Binance, Bybit, OKX — platforms outside U.S. jurisdiction ran the global perpetual futures market. Perps, which let traders hold long or short crypto exposure with no expiry date, simply didn't exist in a regulated domestic wrapper. Kraken changed that on June 15, launching CFTC-regulated perpetual futures for eligible U.S. clients through its subsidiary — a first for the country.
Unlike standard futures, perpetuals never expire. You open a position and hold it as long as you want. The peg to spot price is maintained through a funding rate: longs pay shorts (or vice versa) periodically based on market positioning. Kraken's contracts settle the rate three times daily — at 7 p.m., 3 a.m., and 11 a.m. Central Time — matching the standard used across global crypto exchanges. Global perp trading topped $60 trillion in volume in 2025, roughly twenty times the size of the crypto spot market. That's the product U.S. traders were being locked out of domestically.
The regulatory infrastructure matters here. The contracts trade on Bitnomial, a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse that Kraken's parent company Payward acquired earlier this year. Clearing runs through NinjaTrader Clearing LLC, operating as Kraken Derivatives US — a registered Futures Commission Merchant. Nine assets are available at launch: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA, LINK, DOGE, LTC, and AVAX. Positions share the same futures wallet as Kraken's existing CME-listed contracts, so traders manage everything in one place.
The CFTC signaled an openness to regulated perpetuals in May 2026, and Kraken moved first — having already acquired Bitnomial as the vehicle. Competitors like Coinbase and OKX US now have strong incentive to follow. For U.S. traders, this means access to the world's dominant crypto derivatives product without routing capital through offshore platforms.
