US institutions are getting access to crypto perpetual futures, and not through a US exchange. Singapore Exchange has obtained CFTC authorization to open its bitcoin and ether contracts to American institutional investors.
The route is Regulation 48.10, which lets a CFTC-registered Foreign Board of Trade give US participants direct access to its trading system without registering separately as a US exchange. The rule already existed; SGX qualified under it.
KC Lam, head of crypto derivatives at SGX Group, told CoinDesk the authorization has been obtained and that US participants who previously could not trade the contracts now can.
Access Is Not Live Yet
The authorization is granted, but trading has not begun. Lam said SGX is actively preparing its US clearing members to onboard clients over the next month or two, following completion of its back-office integration.
New clients go through clearing members for KYC checks, deposits, and API connectivity, a process he said typically takes two to four weeks regardless of jurisdiction.
The Timing Against the CME Case
The authorization lands while the question of domestic perpetuals is being fought out in a US courtroom. CME Group is suing the CFTC over its approval of Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual, arguing the contracts are swaps under the Dodd-Frank Act rather than futures.
The Crypto Times reported on September 9 that a brief filed in that case put global perpetuals notional near $90 trillion last year, with none of it on a US-regulated exchange accessible to Americans.
SGX has answered that gap from outside. Rather than a domestic listing subject to the classification dispute, it has used an existing framework for foreign exchanges—leaving the litigation over Kalshi’s contract untouched while US desks gain access to perps in Singapore.
What It Has Traded
Since launching in late November 2025, SGX’s bitcoin and ether perpetuals have recorded $5.8 billion in cumulative volume, roughly 400,000 lots.
Open interest across both contracts stood at 1,300 lots, about $19 million, at the end of August. Bitcoin accounts for 66% of open interest and 83% of daily average volume since inception. The busiest single day reached 11,500 lots, or $145 million notional.
Lam said traders use the contracts for directional views tied to macro themes, including currency debasement, alongside cash-and-carry trades exploiting funding-rate and pricing differentials between venues.
The Crypto Times reported the launch in November 2025, when the contracts went live on November 24 at 0.2 BTC and 5 ETH per lot, cash-settled in US dollars and restricted to accredited, professional, and institutional investors.
Three Crypto-Native Features It Rejects
The product has no expiry, mirroring the crypto-native format, but its risk architecture departs from it in three ways.
There are no auto-liquidations. Lam said the exchange uses margin calls and top-up collateral to prevent involuntary position closures during market spikes, in contrast to venues where sudden volatility triggers automatic closure. That mechanism has been the source of cascading selling in crypto markets, most visibly last October, when liquidations were compounded by auto-deleveraging that socialized losses across both winning and losing positions.
Trading and clearing are kept separate. Crypto-native venues often combine exchange, clearinghouse, and market-maker functions in one entity; SGX routes trades through clearing members acting as an intermediate risk buffer, which Lam described as mirroring traditional futures and commodities infrastructure.
And stablecoins are not accepted as collateral on the stated grounds that they can break peg during volatile periods.
What Comes Next
Lam said dated futures and options for Bitcoin and Ethereum are next in the pipeline, describing that infrastructure as the major lift, after which adding other major coins could become straightforward. He said the exchange is taking a step-by-step approach.
The contracts are benchmarked to indices jointly developed with CoinDesk Indices and managed under the EU Benchmark Regulation, according to Mohit Baheti, head of iEdge Indices at SGX Group. CoinDesk Indices supplies the benchmark for the product, and CoinDesk conducted the interviews on which much of this report is based.
