CFTC Tells Court CME Has No Standing to Fight Perpetual Futures

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission went back to the same argument on Friday, and it still leaves the question at the heart of the case alone. In a brief filed in CME Group's lawsuit over crypto perpetual futures, the agency said the exchange has no standing to sue because it has shown no financial harm. Its evidence is CME's own disclosures. The exchange has told investors it has seen no demand for perpetual contracts and that they are not substitutes for its futures, a position the brief says cannot sit beside the one CME takes in court. CoinDesk reported the filing at 12:47 p.m. New York time on Monday.

The second try at the same exit

This is the agency's second attempt to end the case without defending the label. The CFTC asked the court in early September to toss CME's perpetual futures lawsuit on standing grounds, and that motion left the classification question untouched. Friday's brief does the same at greater length. Three passages from it reached the coverage. CME offers "allegations of increased competition, without any plausible inference of an imminent financial injury," the agency wrote, and "CME must plausibly allege an actual or imminent increase in competition." The third is blunter.

"CME cannot have it one way with the court and another way with the investing public on earnings calls," the agency wrote.

CoinDesk carried all three. A KuCoin flash at 18:45 on Monday carried the first, and Bloomingbit's account, filed five hours before it, carried none of them verbatim. No account read here gives the date the brief was docketed; all of them say Friday.

A volume claim with no number attached

The brief makes one factual assertion alongside the legal ones. CME's crypto futures volume has risen since the agency signalled its policy shift, it says. None of the accounts gives a figure for that, and none of the quoted passages carries one. CME's own releases do carry figures, and they point in more than one direction. Crypto futures and options at the exchange averaged 279,800 contracts a day in the first half of 2026, worth $8.3 billion in notional value. Its 2 October release put September's cryptocurrency average daily volume at 174,000 contracts, or $8.6 billion notional, and the third quarter's at 196,000 contracts, worth $7.3 billion. Contract counts fall across those periods while September's notional sits above the first half's. The periods are different lengths and begin at different points, so they cannot settle whether trading grew after late May. We could not establish which figures, if any, the brief relies on.

Nobody has said what a perpetual contract is

Two rounds of briefing have gone by without touching that. A perpetual future has no expiry and no delivery date, and holders pay each other a periodic funding rate that keeps the contract's price near spot. CME sued on 18 June, arguing those features answer to the Commodity Exchange Act's definition of a swap, and that the agency's 29 May order clearing KalshiEX LLC's cash-settled bitcoin perpetual, BTCPERP, broke with how such products had been treated before. Swaps and futures carry different oversight and different customer eligibility, so the label decides who may trade. The agency's answer has been that CME is free to list perpetuals itself. Kalshi has moved on in the meantime, with a plan to seek clearance for roughly 60 single-stock perpetuals.

Growth on one side, a docket on the other

An analyst note sets out what the delay costs. Jaret Seiberg of TD Cowen told clients on Monday that CME may still have the better of both the standing question and the swaps argument. "What increasingly concerns us is the growth in perps while the litigation is playing out," he wrote, warning that unwinding a larger market would be harder if CME eventually prevails. CME did not respond to a request for comment on the filing. No ruling date has been published. The judge now holds two rounds of argument about who may sue, and nothing at all about what is being sued over.