Hyperliquid Policy Center Calls for Clearer U.S. Rules on Perpetuals

Hyperliquid Policy Center asked the SEC and the CFTC to treat equity perpetual contracts as security futures. 

In a 15-page comment letter, the HPC argued that a contract’s economics and not its reference asset should decide which regulatory category it falls into.

Addressed to CFTC secretary Christopher Kirkpatrick and SEC secretary Vanessa A. Countryman, the letter answers a joint request for comment the two agencies published on 24 June. HPC asks them to confirm that a cash-settled equity perpetual carrying the traditional hallmarks of a futures contract may be listed as a security future.

Perpetual contracts carry standardised terms, fungibility and the ability to exit by taking the opposite position, HPC argues, so a missing expiry date should not decide the category. Expiry exists to pull a contract’s price toward spot, and a perpetual achieves that convergence continuously through its funding rate.

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Three Main Requests

HPC’s three main requests are that regulators preserve the flexibility venues have over listing decisions, apply the same threshold classification across both agencies regardless of reference asset, and modernise a security futures framework commercially dormant since OneChicago closed in 2020. 

“The Commissions can take each of these steps without formal rulemaking”, the group stated.

Disputes over which regulator’s registrants may list a product “often end up litigated in court, as they have for nearly four decades”, according to the letter, which argues a harmonised taxonomy would let exchanges “compete on execution quality and liquidity” instead.

HIP-3 markets, where independent deployers configure their own contracts on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure, have accrued over US$480 billion (AU$672 billion) in notional volume in ten months and hold about US$4 billion (AU$5.6 billion) in open interest, the letter states, crediting data from ASXN. 

Hyperliquid handled nearly US$3 trillion (AU$4.2 trillion) in notional volume in 2025 and over US$1.5 trillion (AU$2.1 trillion) so far in 2026. None of it is open to Americans.

HPC, whose founder and chief executive is Jake Chervinsky, describes itself as “an independent research and advocacy organization dedicated to advancing a clear, regulated path for Americans to access onchain markets, including those available on Hyperliquid.”

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