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U.S. Bitcoin Perpetuals Go Live Before Crypto Founders Get a Public Fundraising Path

By Isaac • August 23, 2026 11:19 am • Comments

Washington has already opened a regulated door for Americans to trade Bitcoin with continuous leverage.

The door for founders who want to raise public money for a new token is still locked.

That is the striking sequence behind the latest phase of U.S. crypto policy. CryptoSlate’s review of the rollout found that true Bitcoin perpetual futures are now live at regulated U.S. venues, while the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto-specific fundraising framework remains only a proposal; its reporting separated approved products, expired regulatory relief and open proposals so readers can see which routes are usable now.

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The difference is not academic. A trader can now take a Bitcoin position larger than the collateral posted and keep it open without an expiration date.

A founder still cannot use the SEC’s proposed crypto rules to sell tokens to the public.

The contrast is especially sharp because both changes arrived in the same summer. Live derivatives reached traders while the fundraising proposal entered a months-long rulemaking process.

Perpetual futures, commonly called perps, are built for markets that never close. Unlike a conventional futures contract, a perpetual has no fixed maturity date.

A funding payment between long and short traders helps keep the contract near Bitcoin’s spot price. As long as the trader maintains enough collateral, the position can remain open.

That convenience comes with real risk. Leverage makes gains larger, but it also brings the liquidation price closer.

A violent market move can force an exchange to close positions automatically.

CoinGlass showed the market leaning hard into that risk before Bitcoin’s latest surge. Its August 18 heatmap identified dense pools of high-leverage liquidity around the market.

Two days later, CoinGlass reported that $3.07 billion in crypto short positions had been liquidated. The forced buying helped accelerate Bitcoin’s climb through a market already loaded with bearish leverage.

That is the environment into which regulated U.S. perpetuals are arriving.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP contract on May 29. The order put a true perpetual tied to Bitcoin’s spot price inside a designated contract market instead of leaving the product entirely to offshore exchanges.

The contract uses a periodic funding mechanism rather than a fixed expiration date. That lets traders maintain continuous exposure without closing one dated futures position and opening another.

Kalshi can offer exposure of up to six times a trader’s collateral, but the venue still sits inside the CFTC’s margin, surveillance, clearing and customer-protection structure. The approval was therefore a regulated product decision, not permission for unrestricted leverage.

Bitnomial has also launched U.S.-regulated perpetual futures, including Bitcoin. Together, the two live venues show that the CFTC’s decision has already moved beyond a policy announcement and into an operating domestic market.

The agency did not hand every exchange an automatic license to list any perpetual it wants. The CFTC’s accompanying policy statement says these products should receive case-by-case review under Regulation 40.3.

That approach matters because a perpetual’s funding formula, collateral rules, liquidation design and reference market can all change its risk. A Bitcoin contract backed by deep, continuous spot trading is not automatically a model for thinly traded tokens, equities, energy or other assets.

The CFTC also emphasized that an exchange must still satisfy the core principles that govern designated contract markets. Those duties cover fair trading, position monitoring, financial integrity and systems capable of operating through stressed markets.

In practical terms, the agency had an established review door it could use. It needed to decide whether a specific contract fit the derivatives framework, not invent a new kind of issuer or define an asset’s entire legal life cycle.

Token fundraising is a much larger rulemaking project.

The SEC’s proposed Regulation Crypto Assets tackles a much wider set of questions. It would create a $5 million startup exemption, larger offering tiers of $20 million and $75 million, and disclosure rules tailored to token networks rather than ordinary corporate stock.

The proposal also tries to answer what happens after a network is built. It outlines a potential safe-harbor path through which a crypto asset could separate from the investment contract originally used to finance development once the issuer’s essential work is complete.

That requires the SEC to define financial statements, buyer disclosures, resale conditions and the point at which an issuer is no longer central to the asset’s value. It must also address how the federal framework interacts with state registration requirements.

But none of those routes is active today. The proposal must move through public comments, possible revisions and a final Commission vote before any founder can rely on it.

Until that happens, crypto teams still depend on conventional securities exemptions, private capital or offshore structures. The United States has proposed a public token-offering system written for decentralized networks, but it has not yet delivered one founders can actually use.

The mismatch leaves the United States better equipped to trade established crypto assets than to finance new ones.

A regulated institution can hedge Bitcoin around the clock or take a leveraged directional position without rolling a dated contract. A startup building the next network still has no usable crypto-specific path to raise public money under the SEC proposal.

There is a practical upside to building the trading layer first. If the SEC eventually finalizes a workable fundraising rule, newly financed tokens could enter a domestic market that already has regulated hedging, price discovery and institutional infrastructure.

The danger is that sophisticated leverage grows faster than the legal channels for productive capital formation. More trading capacity does not automatically create more American crypto companies.

The current order of operations is now clear: Bitcoin perpetuals are live, leverage is already moving markets, and the rules for public token fundraising are still waiting for their final form.

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