{"id":12182,"date":"2026-08-21T11:43:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T11:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cryptonews.uk.com\/?p=12182"},"modified":"2026-08-21T11:43:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T11:43:18","slug":"us-rule-rewrite-looms-for-200b-on-chain-venue-hyperliquid-as-trump-signals-onshore-approval","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cryptonews.uk.com\/?p=12182","title":{"rendered":"US rule rewrite looms for $200B on-chain venue Hyperliquid as Trump signals onshore approval"},"content":{"rendered":"

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President Donald Trump said Aug. 19 that CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring Hyperliquid to the US in a fully compliant, legal way.<\/p>\n

Hyperliquid’s official interface currently keeps US persons off the platform, part of the regulatory geography that let crypto’s largest perpetual futures venue grow up outside American oversight.<\/p>\n

Hyperliquid processed over $114 billion of perpetual futures trading volume in August and carries open interest above $10 billion. It has crossed $5 trillion in cumulative perpetual volume and generates close to $50 million in protocol fees every month.<\/p>\n

\"Hyperliquid\"Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid\u2019s perpetual volume fell sharply in August while open interest climbed toward $12 billion after rising steadily since February.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

HYPE rallied past $70 again for the first time since early July, up 20% since Trump’s remarks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Metric<\/th>\nApproximate figure<\/th>\nWhy it matters<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
30-day perpetual volume<\/td>\n~$200B<\/td>\nShows active trading scale<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Open interest<\/td>\n$10B+<\/td>\nShows the size of live leveraged exposure<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cumulative perpetual volume<\/td>\n$5T+<\/td>\nShows long-term market relevance<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Monthly protocol fees<\/td>\n~$50M<\/td>\nShows the economic value of U.S. access<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
HYPE move after Trump remarks<\/td>\n+20%<\/td>\nShows the market interpreted the comment as material<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Selig’s own remarks are the real policy hook<\/h2>\n

Speaking to the agency’s Innovation Advisory Committee on Aug. 20, Selig said that if the CLARITY Act stalls in Congress, the CFTC will use its existing authority to start building a crypto market regime on its own.<\/p>\n

He said he had directed staff to explore rules that could designate both current registrants and non-registrant crypto exchanges as a type of designated contract market called a crypto asset market.<\/p>\n

That designation would allow leveraged or margined crypto trading under rules built specifically for that purpose. He added that staff would engage directly with developers of on-chain finance protocols to find legal, compliant ways to offer those protocols inside the US.<\/p>\n

That detail turns Trump’s comment from a presidential aside into policy substance. A crypto asset market designation, if it becomes real, would create another category that on-chain and offshore venues could try to enter.<\/p>\n

Regulators already solved a narrower version of this problem in May, when the CFTC approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP contract, a genuine perpetual contract tied to spot Bitcoin and listed on a registered US exchange.<\/p>\n

Selig said at the time that the absence of a workable US pathway had pushed perpetual trading offshore for years, fragmenting liquidity and putting US firms at a disadvantage.<\/p>\n

Hyperliquid tests whether the venue itself, an on-chain, wallet-native market built entirely outside the conventional US brokerage stack, can become compliant without losing the architecture that made it successful.<\/p>\n

What a compliant version of Hyperliquid would require<\/h2>\n

CFTC rules were written around centralized intermediaries: registered exchanges, clearinghouses, futures commission merchants and brokers with clear obligations attached to each role.<\/p>\n

Hyperliquid does not map cleanly onto any of those categories, and Selig has acknowledged as much, saying the agency’s existing framework needs rethinking for wallets, decentralized protocols and other on-chain systems.<\/p>\n

A workable path would have to resolve several things at once, such as who counts as the regulated operator when a protocol runs on-chain but a front end sits somewhere identifiable, and where identity verification happens, at the interface, the broker layer, or somewhere else entirely.<\/p>\n