For years, perpetual futures have been crypto's most traded instrument and almost none of that volume has touched U.S.-regulated infrastructure. Until now. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally approved KalshiEX to list BTCPERP, a no-expiry Bitcoin perpetual futures contract tied to spot BTC prices. On the same day, the agency's Market Participants Division issued a staff-level interpretation clearing Coinbase Financial Markets to route U.S. customers to certain derivatives on Deribit, its offshore affiliate. Two very different regulatory moves, made on the same morning, pointed at the same underlying problem: American traders have been effectively locked out of the largest segment of global crypto markets.

 

CFTC Chairman Mike Selig framed the Kalshi order as delivery on a specific commitment to onshore crypto perpetuals, describing the move as a path for one of the most liquid segments of the crypto asset markets to exist inside the U.S. regulatory framework. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong put a number to the problem his company says it is solving: until now, U.S. users have been locked out of roughly 80% of global crypto markets, which includes perpetual futures and options. Coinbase cited Deribit's more than $185 billion in July 2025 trading volume and approximately $60 billion in open interest at the time of acquisition to illustrate the scale of what domestic traders could not legally access through regulated channels.

 

What the CFTC Actually Approved

BTCPERP is a cash-settled contract referencing the U.S. dollar spot price of one Bitcoin, as tracked by the CF Benchmarks Bitcoin Real Time Index. It trades in units of one ten-thousandth of a BTC, runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has no fixed expiry date.  Traditional futures converge toward their underlying asset at expiration because physical delivery or final cash settlement pulls the contract to spot. A perpetual has no such date, so the convergence mechanism operates continuously through periodic funding payments between long and short holders. If the contract trades above spot, longs pay shorts. If it trades below, shorts pay longs. The economic pressure keeps the perpetual price tracking Bitcoin in real time.

 

The CFTC's approval leans heavily on Bitcoin's specific market structure as its justification. The order notes Bitcoin's deep, active, and continuous spot trading across broadly distributed venues, with pricing observable around the clock. That depth is what makes the funding rate mechanism credible: arbitrageurs can act while the perpetual is live, since the underlying spot market never closes. The agency was explicit that this reasoning applies to Bitcoin and to similarly structured digital commodities with comparable market depth. Other assets will need to go through a separate review. Bitnomial had previously received certification for a product labeled a perpetual futures contract, but that contract carried a 25-year term limit and is considered a different structure. BTCPERP is the first true no-expiry perpetual to receive a Commission-level order.

 

Two Paths, Very Different Weight

The distinction between the Kalshi approval and the Coinbase staff letter matters more than it might look at first glance. Kalshi's BTCPERP is a Commission-issued order under Section 5c(c)(4) of the Commodity Exchange Act and Regulation 40.3. That is formal product approval, with binding legal weight and a clear compliance framework. Coinbase's route is different in kind. The Market Participants Division issued an interpretation and a no-action position in response to Coinbase Financial Markets. Staff confirmed that certain Deribit digital commodity derivatives may be categorized as foreign futures under Regulation 30.1, and said it would not recommend enforcement action under specified conditions tied to how customer digital assets and stablecoins are handled as margin through Coinbase affiliates.

 

Staff letters are conditional by design. The CFTC was clear: these positions represent the Market Participants Division only, are not binding on the Commission, and can be modified, suspended, or terminated. The Coinbase path is useful for reaching scale quickly because it connects U.S. clients directly to Deribit's existing liquidity pool, which is among the largest in global crypto derivatives. But it carries a thinner precedential footprint. Coinbase said institutional onboarding to Deribit options has already begun, with perpetual futures access and broader retail availability described as coming later, without a hard timeline. Retail access is expected to carry additional eligibility criteria and risk disclosure requirements.

 

The Liquidity Question Nobody Can Answer Yet

Regulatory clearance is the easy part. Getting traders to use a U.S. regulated perpetual when Binance, Bybit, and OKX offer the same exposure with deeper order books and, in most cases, higher leverage, is the actual test. Offshore exchanges process billions of dollars in Bitcoin perp volume on a slow day. The CFTC has been working toward this moment for over a year, issuing a formal request for comment in April 2025 on perpetual derivatives, their benefits, risks, market integrity implications, and customer protection questions. The approvals are, in that sense, the policy answer to the RFI. The market answer comes when Kalshi's BTCPERP goes live and traders decide whether regulated access at U.S. leverage limits is a compelling enough trade-off.

 

The CFTC's case-by-case stance on future perpetual approvals means the template is now set, but the runway is not yet cleared. Ethereum perps, Solana perps, and other digital assets with sufficient spot market depth could follow, but each application needs to clear the same review process independently. Kalshi separately indicated it plans to launch perpetual contracts on more than a dozen currencies pending additional regulatory reviews. CME's parallel push toward 24/7 crypto futures and options trading adds another dimension to the picture: traditional derivatives infrastructure is adapting to match crypto's always-on market structure, while crypto-native exchanges now have a formal path to operate inside U.S. regulatory boundaries. Whether the liquidity follows is a question of product quality, margin efficiency, and distribution reach, and none of that gets answered in an approval order.

 

The next signals are practical: Kalshi's launch terms and funding rate performance, Coinbase's timeline for rolling out perpetual futures through CFM, how retail access gets structured, and whether formal rulemaking eventually hardens the current agency posture into something more durable. For now, U.S.-regulated Bitcoin perps exist. Whether they can actually compete is the harder question, and the market will answer it faster than any regulator. It usually does.

 

Speaking at the 2026 Reagan National Economic Forum in Simi Valley, California, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow that the United States has seized roughly $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency from entities linked to Iran's military since conflict broke out in February. 

 

"We just outright grabbed the wallets," Bessent said. "Some of them may be typing in right now, and they might not have realized that their wallet had been grabbed."

 

Operation Economic Fury

The seizures Bessent referenced didn't happen overnight. They are the product of a campaign called Operation Economic Fury, a Treasury-led financial pressure initiative that kicked off around March 2025 under the Trump administration's direction. The goal, broadly, has been to cut off Iran's ability to move money internationally by targeting its revenue streams, weapons funding infrastructure, and sanctions evasion networks.

 

Before this campaign intensified, Iran had reportedly been routing $400 million to $500 million per month through crypto, primarily USDT on the Tron blockchain, to fund oil sales and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operations.  It's a shadow banking pipeline built on a stablecoin that, for various reasons, became the preferred dollar substitute in sanctioned economies around the world.

 

The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has since sanctioned more than 1,000 Iran-linked entities and wallet addresses. It has also gotten some notable help from the private sector.

 

Tether as a Sanctions Tool

On April 24, 2026, Tether froze $344 million in USDT across two Tron blockchain addresses tied to Iran's IRGC and the Central Bank of Iran. One wallet held approximately $213 million; the other, $131 million. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis had flagged the addresses based on on-chain patterns consistent with known Iranian military wallets, and the freeze was coordinated directly with U.S. law enforcement and updated OFAC designations published the same day.

 

USDT circulates heavily on Tron precisely because it became a preferred rail for cross-border transfers in regions where traditional dollar-based banking is unavailable or restricted. By working with Tether to freeze those wallets, the Treasury effectively turned the world's largest stablecoin into a live sanctions enforcement mechanism. That's a significant shift in how financial pressure campaigns work in the digital asset era.

 

The implications go beyond Iran. Tether's cooperation confirms, in practice, that USDT is not a neutral financial instrument. It is subject to the same policy levers as the dollar-based correspondent banking system it was often pitched as an alternative to.

 

Bitcoin, Hormuz, and the Limits of "Untraceable" Crypto

The IRGC's crypto ambitions have not been limited to stablecoins. In April, the Financial Times reported that Iran was planning to require oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz to pay transit fees in Bitcoin. An Iranian official quoted at the time said the fees "can't be traced or confiscated due to sanctions." That quote aged poorly.

 

This month, Iran's state-affiliated Fars news agency reported that the IRGC promoted a Bitcoin-settled maritime insurance platform called Hormuz Safe. The scheme is a direct response to the ongoing blockade of the waterway, through which roughly 20% of the world's oil flows. With oil revenues choked and the regime under mounting financial pressure, digital assets have become one of the few remaining channels to keep funds moving.

 

Bessent did not directly link the $1 billion in seizures to the Bitcoin toll scheme. He also did not confirm whether Bitcoin itself was among the seized assets. Those details remain unspecified. What he did confirm is that the campaign is ongoing, that the seizures are substantial, and that some of those holding the funds may still be unaware.

 

Legal Fallout and Frozen Funds

The frozen Tether tranche is already the subject of a legal battle. A group of American terrorism victims, families connected to a 1997 Hamas bombing in Jerusalem, filed a motion in Manhattan federal court in mid-May seeking to have the $344 million transferred directly to their attorneys. Their unpaid court judgments against Iran total more than $2.4 billion across multiple terrorism-related cases. The plaintiffs served restraining notices on Tether just three days after the original freeze.

 

It is a legally complex situation. Tether froze the wallets by blacklisting the addresses at the smart contract level. Whether those funds can be redirected to private plaintiffs rather than held by the government is an open question, and one that federal courts will likely spend considerable time untangling.

 

Where This Leaves Iran, and Crypto

Bessent's comments Friday came as negotiations over a potential ceasefire deal were apparently inching forward. Reports citing Axios indicated that negotiators had reached a preliminary agreement pending Trump's approval. Whether that changes the pace of seizures is unclear.

 

What is clear is that Iran's crypto holdings are larger than the seized amount. Estimates put total Iranian digital asset holdings at roughly $7.7 billion, with about half attributed to the IRGC. The billion seized so far is meaningful pressure but not a knockout blow.

 

For the broader crypto market, the episode lands as a reminder that the "permissionless" framing of digital assets has always had limits. When the asset is a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by a centralized company, and that company cooperates with the U.S. Treasury, the network rails may be decentralized but the kill switch is not. That reality is going to shape how governments, firms, and bad actors all think about crypto infrastructure for years to come.

 

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has signed a new pro-crypto bill into law that establishes a comprehensive regulatory framework for the use of cryptocurrencies.

 

The bill, known as Senate Bill S.163, was passed this week and creates a crypto-friendly environment for crypto use. According to the new law, individuals and businesses are no longer prohibited from accepting digital assets as payment or from using self-hosted or hardware wallets to store their crypto holdings.

 

By passing this pro-crypto law, the South Carolina government enhances the real-world utility of cryptocurrencies, especially in payment finance, and removes regulatory uncertainty associated with their use in commercial activities.

 

Since the newly enacted law exempts cryptocurrencies used for payment from any additional tax or government-imposed charges, it prevents merchants and businesses from discriminating against crypto transactions or against converting crypto into a tax-disadvantaged payment method. The result is that crypto moves further into the mainstream and its adoption increases.

 

The Anti-CBDC Portion of the Bill

Another important aspect of the newly enacted law is the anti-CBDC provision, which rejects the use of a government-controlled digital asset.

 

Under the new legislation, no state-level government parastatal, including agencies, boards, commissions, and departments, may accept or require payments in central bank digital currency (CBDC). The law also prevents these state-level entities from participating in any “digital asset” test conducted by the Federal Reserve.

 

The law also strongly supports crypto mining, prohibiting local governments from restricting mining in industrial zones or imposing any additional limits on mining companies beyond general noise pollution regulations.

 

South Carolina Becomes Latest Crypto-Friendly State

With these pro-crypto bills passed, South Carolina has joined other crypto-friendly states, such as Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Louisiana, and Arizona, that have enacted similar laws.

 

In March of last year, Kentucky passed a pro-crypto bill, HB 701, into law. Just like South Carolina's new laws, the law allowed users to hold and use digital assets in self-hosted wallets or hardware wallets. The law also exempted digital asset mining companies from the requirement to obtain a money transmitter license or comply with securities regulations before operating in the state.