- Bloomberg reports that Hyperliquid is in advanced talks with Payward, the company behind Kraken, over a route into the US perpetual futures market.
- Payward has reportedly shown the CFTC an outline of how the arrangement would be structured. Nothing has been approved.
- The sourcing is unnamed people familiar with the talks, relayed through a secondary report. Treat the detail as provisional.
American traders have spent years watching the busiest product in crypto from the other side of a wall. A report from Bloomberg, picked up by The Block, says one of the biggest venues for that product is now looking for a way through it, with Kraken’s parent company holding the door.
Perpetual futures are where most of the leveraged money in crypto actually trades, and US residents have largely been shut out of them. If that changes, the largest retail market in the world gets access to a product built for very fast gains and very fast losses.
For UK readers, the practical answer is simpler: nothing changes here. The Financial Conduct Authority’s ban on selling crypto derivatives to retail consumers is still in force, so a US opening does not open anything in Britain.
What a perpetual future actually is
A normal futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell something at a set price on a set date. It expires. That expiry is the whole shape of the thing.
A perpetual future strips the date out. You take a position on whether a coin goes up or down, usually with borrowed money layered on top so a small move in the price produces a large move in your account, and you can hold it indefinitely. To stop the contract drifting away from the real market price, traders on one side pay a small fee to traders on the other at regular intervals. When more people are betting on a rise, the buyers pay the sellers. When the mood flips, the payments flip.
That funding mechanism is the clever part and also the expensive part. Hold a crowded position long enough and the fees alone can eat the trade.
US regulators have never been comfortable with any of it. Offering leveraged crypto derivatives to American retail customers requires registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the offshore venues where perpetuals grew up mostly did not have it. So the product became something Americans read about rather than used, while Hyperliquid and its competitors built enormous volumes serving everyone else.
What is actually being reported
According to Bloomberg’s account, relayed by The Block, Payward has presented the CFTC with an outline of the proposed structure. An outline is not an application, and a presentation is not a decision.
We have not seen the original Bloomberg piece, and the reporting rests on people who are not named. That matters more than usual with a story like this, because the gap between “in advanced talks” and “live for US customers” is filled entirely with regulatory work that has not visibly happened yet. Neither Payward nor Hyperliquid has published anything confirming the arrangement at the time of writing.
Payward is a reasonable partner for it on paper. The company already operates a registered US futures business, and it has spent the past year attaching itself to regulated infrastructure elsewhere: it is working with the London Stock Exchange on putting 100 UK-listed stocks through its xStocks framework, itself still subject to approval. Kraken remains its main consumer business, and you can read our Kraken review for what that side of it looks like from a UK account.
The part the report leaves out
Hyperliquid does not arrive at a regulator’s door with a clean slate. analysts have spent this month tracking wallets linked to North Korean actors moving tens of millions through the platform, selling positions in size. That is a normal hazard for any large permissionless venue, and it is not evidence of wrongdoing by the . It is also precisely the kind of thing a US regulator reads before it signs anything.
There is a structural question underneath that. Hyperliquid’s appeal is that anyone with a wallet can trade on it without an account or an identity check. A CFTC-facing product needs the opposite. Whatever gets built here will not be the thing American traders have been reading about; it will be a walled-off version with the identity checks, position limits and reporting that US derivatives rules demand. How much of the original survives that translation is the question nobody has answered.
What to watch
A filing. Talks reported by unnamed people become real when a registered entity submits something the CFTC has to respond to, and that document will say far more about the shape of the product than any amount of briefing. Watch also for whether either company confirms the talks on the record: silence from both is normal at this stage, but a denial would be informative.
For UK readers, the thing to watch is not this deal at all. It is whether the FCA revisits its retail derivatives ban, and there is no sign of that yet. More in our policy coverage.