- Payward, the company behind Kraken, has publicly set out a plan to offer US clients perpetual futures matched and recorded on the Hyperliquid .
- It would run through Payward’s regulated derivatives business, built on its $550m acquisition of Bitnomial, and be open only to approved US accounts.
- This is a stated plan rather than a live product. No launch date has been given, and the US version would be permissioned rather than open to any wallet.
American traders have spent years watching the busiest product in crypto from the other side of a wall. Payward, the company behind Kraken, has now said it intends to put a door in that wall, using the regulated derivatives business it spent $550m assembling.
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 Payward has actually said
The plan, as reported by CoinDesk, is for permissioned perpetual futures markets deployed on Hyperliquid: orders matched and recorded on the protocol, routed through Payward’s regulated derivatives structure, and available only to approved US accounts. The company says it aims to be the first registered US exchange to put markets on the protocol.
The vehicle for that is Bitnomial, the derivatives exchange Payward bought for $550m. The acquisition is what makes the rest of it plausible, because the registrations sit with the business it bought rather than needing to be built from nothing.
An earlier Bloomberg report, relayed by The Block, described unnamed people familiar with advanced talks, and an outline Payward had shown the CFTC. That now reads as the groundwork for this. What has changed is who is saying it: a company setting out its own intentions can be held against what eventually ships, in a way that a briefing cannot. What has not changed is that nothing is trading. No launch date has been published, and a plan presented to a regulator still depends on the regulator.
Payward is better placed for this than most. It 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 plan 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 protocol. 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 US derivatives product needs the opposite, and the word Payward is using, permissioned, concedes as much. So the version American traders eventually get will not be the version they have been reading about. How much of the original survives the translation is still unanswered: the leverage allowed, the markets offered, and whether approved US accounts trade into the same pool of liquidity as everyone else or a separate one.
What to watch
A filing, still. A stated plan becomes a regulated product when the registered entity submits something the CFTC has to respond to, and that document will say far more about the shape of it than any announcement. Watch alongside it for a launch date, and for whether Hyperliquid itself says anything on the record about hosting markets it cannot let everyone trade.
Then the mechanics, because they decide what this actually is. If approved US accounts sit in the protocol’s existing order book, this is genuine access to Hyperliquid. If they sit in a walled pool of their own, it is a separate venue with Hyperliquid’s name attached, and the prices will show it.
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.