Today, HPC filed a comment letter supporting the @SECGov’s proposed Regulation Crypto Assets and recommending five refinements before the Commission adopts it. For years, builders could not tell when the securities laws applied to their tokens, and many launched abroad or excluded Americans. The proposal gives them a federal path: offerings of up to $75 million a year, a safe harbor for tokens that no longer depend on their developers, and relief from state-by-state registration. Read it here:

HPC spent last week in Singapore with the people building onchain markets. Our team joined the Hyperliquid community event, TOKEN2049, DAS Asia, and HypurrCo Gathers. The best part of the week was meeting the builders in person. Every conversation in Singapore reinforced the same point: onchain perpetuals are traded all over the world, and our job is to make the case for bringing that market to America. Thank you to @HyperliquidX, @token2049, @blockworksDAS, @hypurr_co, and everyone who spent time with us last week. We are back in Washington, and back to work.

The @CFTC just took an important step toward adopting a federal rulebook for crypto market structure: the Commission proposed rules for exchanges that let Americans trade crypto with leverage, including a new type of CFTC registration that is fit for purpose. An exchange’s regulatory path would follow its product set: (1) state licensing for spot trading, backstopped by the CFTC's anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority; (2) CFTC registration for leverage under rules written for crypto; and (3) the existing DCM framework for perps and other derivatives. Builders shipping code onchain, and the Americans using it, would know where they stand under federal law. Separately, the CFTC is working directly with builders to develop lawful pathways for onchain markets in the United States, and is drafting a policy so that developers who publish software but do not take orders, control execution, or hold customer assets would not have to register as brokers. Thank you to @ChairmanSelig and the CFTC staff for the effort behind today's proposal and for putting onchain markets on the agenda.

Yesterday, HPC responded to @EU_Finance’s review of MiCA, our first filing outside the U.S., urging the Commission to build on existing EU rules for onchain markets. The EU wrote the first rulebook for crypto-asset markets. Its review now asks which rulebook governs perpetual futures, one of the most traded derivative products in the world. Our position: perpetual futures belong under MiFID II, the EU’s framework for derivatives, regardless of how they are recorded or what asset class they reference. Applying MiFID II with attention to how onchain markets work will give EU investors access to regulated markets that are deeper, continuously margined, and verifiable by anyone. Read it here:

Today, the @CFTC took an important step toward bringing regulated onchain markets to the United States: firms can now keep required records on a public blockchain without being required to maintain a separate offchain copy. The CFTC also clarified that firms can invest customer funds in tokenized versions of investments that are already permitted. That matters because a regulated firm can now use a public blockchain as its system of record, where every entry is transparent, tamper-evident, and verifiable by anyone. Those are the assurances the CFTC’s recordkeeping rules exist to provide, and public blockchains deliver them by design. In July, HPC and @phantom asked the CFTC to provide this clarity. Today, the CFTC delivered.

Today, we filed an amicus brief in CME v. Selig with a @CooleyLLP team led by former Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, urging the court to grant the @CFTC's motion to dismiss. For years, Americans were pushed offshore to trade perpetual futures. This spring, the @CFTC opened the door at home. In June, CME sued to close it. That anticompetitive effort must fail.

"We have a window of opportunity here where we can actually move the needle and get these products into the United States in a regulated fashion, and then build up the most liquid markets in the world." @jchervinsky on The Rollup. Full interview below.

Perpetual contracts were not on the agenda at the @CFTC's first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting, but they still came up in every session, in a room with some of the biggest names in finance. Today, we submitted a statement supporting the Commission's work to bring perpetual futures markets onshore and keep them at the center of the innovation agenda. Read it here:

Oil prices move 24/7. The markets that American businesses use to hedge them do not. Today, HPC and @tradexyz filed a joint comment letter asking the @CFTC to open a regulated path for energy perpetual contracts and 24/7 trading in the United States. During February's oil shock, roughly two-thirds of the weekend price move had already occurred onchain before U.S. futures reopened Sunday evening. The next crisis should find American businesses able to manage their risk in real time, under CFTC oversight.

The world's largest markets for perpetual contracts grew offshore because U.S. regulators hadn’t answered a basic question: are they futures or swaps? The CFTC began answering that question in May, allowing the first perpetuals to list on a U.S. exchange as futures contracts. Today, we asked both the @SECGov and @CFTC to confirm that equity perpetuals can be listed as security futures. That confirmation would provide the clarity necessary to bring these products onshore.