Payward asks the CFTC to bless perps matched onchain

The CFTC is the only gate left between Payward and a U.S. perpetual futures market that matches on Hyperliquid's public blockchain. The plan, announced Wednesday, would list the contracts under the rules of Bitnomial Exchange, Payward's CFTC-regulated designated contract market, and would require clients to open futures accounts with Payward's broker, NinjaTrader Clearing, and with Bitnomial, approved by both. It begins with Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets, which allow third parties to deploy and administer their own permissioned perpetual futures markets.

The plumbing deserves a close read. Bitnomial Exchange and Bitnomial Clearinghouse would serve as the HIP-3 deployer, creating, owning and administering the market, then clearing and settling its contracts, while NinjaTrader Clearing carries client accounts and Hyperliquid's onchain order book matches and records the trades. Jon Pham, Payward's head of U.S. derivatives, described the flow as a U.S. client opening an account with the registered broker and trading new contracts on Hyperliquid, cleared through the same clearinghouse that already supports the crypto perpetual contracts Payward offers U.S. clients today. The announcement did not include a fee schedule, expected trading volumes, an economic arrangement with Hyperliquid, or a launch date.

Scale is the reason to bother. Perpetuals have largely traded outside U.S. regulated markets since their 2016 debut, with more than $85 trillion changing hands worldwide in 2025, per CoinGecko's 2026 State of Crypto Perpetuals Report, and Hyperliquid's decentralized exchange settles roughly 9% of all open perp positions worldwide. DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk show the venue's revenue down 43%, the backdrop against which a regulated U.S. distribution partner starts to look useful.

Payward has been assembling that distribution through its May purchase of Bitnomial for $550 million and its 2025 acquisition of NinjaTrader Clearing for $1.5 billion, a chain of subsidiaries that puts the exchange, the clearinghouse and the broker under one parent. Talks to put Hyperliquid's perps on Bitnomial surfaced at the end of August, following a White House endorsement of the CFTC's onshoring push earlier that month. With the Clarity Act dead at 49-50, that agency route is the only one open, as this publication has argued.

The approval question is no longer whether the commission tolerates perpetual futures under a DCM's rulebook; it is whether the CFTC accepts a market whose matching engine belongs to a public chain while the deployer, clearinghouse and broker sit under one roof. Each of those three roles is a control point, the kind of lever that lets an onchain venue be described to a regulator in the language of exchange rules rather than the language of offshore venues, and each is revocable. An accommodation granted by this commission can be unmade by the next, and that is the price of admission for a product that cannot reach U.S. clients any other way. The thing to watch is the first order that never touches Bitnomial's own book.