- Singapore Exchange filed with the CFTC last month to offer crypto perpetual futures to US institutions and can proceed if it receives no objection within 10 days. It would be the first major traditional exchange to bring perps, crypto’s leveraged, no-expiry futures product, into the mainstream US institutional market.
- SGX’s contracts differ from crypto-native versions by design: they trade 22.5 hours a day, five days a week rather than 24/7, require 35% margin posted in fiat collateral, and skip the automatic deleveraging mechanisms common on crypto platforms. SGX’s head of crypto derivatives, KC Lam, said the target client base of institutions and accredited investors doesn’t trade weekends anyway.
- The liquidity gap is stark. Decentralized platform Hyperliquid handles roughly $80 billion to $100 billion a month in Bitcoin and Ether perps, while SGX has recorded about $6 billion total across its perpetual futures since launching last November. In August alone SGX traded 29,655 Bitcoin perps and 6,758 Ether perps, bringing its eight-month 2026 total to 353,825 contracts.
- The regulatory door opened in May when the CFTC approved the first true Bitcoin perpetual contract on Kalshi, a domestic registered exchange. Coinbase has since moved aggressively too, enabling institutional access to global crypto perpetuals and options through its regulated futures arm in May and filing with the SEC this month to offer equity-based perps.
What Happened?
SGX is betting that US institutional demand, rather than retail volume, is the market worth winning. Lam pointed to the depth of US institutional crypto participation across futures and ETFs as the natural reason to pivot there, and argues SGX’s position as a multi-asset exchange, where institutions can trade crypto alongside equity, rate, currency and commodity derivatives on one venue, is a differentiator crypto-native platforms don’t offer. He also framed SGX’s Asian trading hours as a complement to US-hours liquidity rather than a competitor to it. The push comes as President Trump has publicly directed CFTC Chairman Michael Selig to work on bringing Hyperliquid into the US “in a fully compliant and legal fashion,” though without a firm commitment or timeline, signaling the administration’s broader interest in domesticating offshore crypto derivatives activity.
Why It Matters?
The interesting tension is that making perps compliant necessarily makes them less crypto-native — 22.5-hour trading, higher margin requirements and no auto-deleveraging are exactly the constraints that traditional finance imposes to manage risk, and they’re also exactly what differentiates SGX’s version from what made perps popular in the first place. Whether institutions actually prefer the compliant, lower-leverage version over offshore access is the real open question, and the 15x-plus liquidity gap versus Hyperliquid suggests the market hasn’t answered it yet. For allocators, this is a preview of how crypto derivatives infrastructure consolidates as regulation clarifies: multiple credible venues — Kalshi, Coinbase, now SGX — are racing to capture the same US institutional flow with different structural trade-offs, and the winner will likely be determined by margin efficiency and cross-asset capital treatment rather than by being first to market.
What’s Next?
The 10-day CFTC objection window is the immediate gate SGX needs to clear. After that, volume growth (or the lack of it) over the following months will show whether “liquidity begets liquidity,” as Lam argues, or whether US institutions stay with existing offshore relationships out of inertia. Watch Coinbase’s SEC filing for equity-based perps as the next major regulatory decision point, since approval there would open an entirely adjacent product category. Any further signal from Selig or the White House on formally bringing Hyperliquid onshore would also reshape the competitive landscape, since a compliant Hyperliquid entry would directly challenge the liquidity advantage that’s currently keeping institutional flow offshore.
Source: Bloomberg
