President Donald Trump said Wednesday that CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring Hyperliquid, the largest onchain venue for perpetual futures, into the United States in a “fully compliant and legal fashion.” The comment came during his White House meeting with crypto and technology executives.
HYPE has surged as much as 25% over 24 hours after the remark. The three U.S. Hyperliquid funds, 21Shares’ THYP, Bitwise’s BHYP and Grayscale’s staking product HYPG, each rose close to 20% in Wednesday’s session. Hyperliquid Strategies, the Nasdaq-listed treasury vehicle trading as PURR, gained 30.4%. Trump did not describe what an onshore version would look like, and no CFTC approval exists.
For traders, the significance is that the biggest offshore venue in a market U.S. exchanges covet may get a regulated route in rather than an enforcement fight. Perpetual futures carry no expiry and let traders take leveraged directional exposure without owning the asset, a structure that has drawn non-crypto traders into 24/7 markets for products like oil during off hours, JPMorgan analysts have said.
Selig has said a version of this before. In a June interview with Bankless, he said onchain technology of Hyperliquid’s kind will “transform our markets” and that the agency wants a path to bring onchain venues into the U.S. under some form of regulation. The CFTC has already cracked the door, approving Kalshi’s BTCPERP as the first true bitcoin perpetual on a regulated U.S. exchange in June and issuing Coinbase Financial Markets a no-action letter to route customers into perps listed on its Bermuda arm.
Hyperliquid has been preparing the ground. The Hyper Foundation committed 1 million HYPE, worth roughly $29 million at the time, to launch the Hyperliquid Policy Center in Washington under Jake Chervinsky in February, and in July the group pushed back on broker rules for DeFi software in a comment letter to the CFTC. ICE chair Jeffrey Sprecher, who sat in Wednesday’s White House meeting, disclosed in May that his company had held multiple meetings with Hyperliquid.
Related Listen: Why RWAs Just Out-Traded Crypto on Hyperliquid for the First Time
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