Last year, traders moved more than $60 trillion through one crypto product. Almost none of it happened in the U.S.
On Monday, Kraken started to bring that trade home. It switched on "perpetual futures" for U.S. customers for the first time.
What Kraken Turned On
A perpetual future is a bet on where a coin's price is headed. It has no end date, so traders call it a "perp."
Most futures expire and have to be renewed. A perp just keeps running, like a gym pass that never ends.
That design makes perps easy to hold for a long time. It also lets traders make big bets with less cash up front, which adds risk.
Kraken now offers perps inside Kraken Pro, its trading app. They start with major coins like bitcoin, ether and solana, and more coins are on the way.
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Why It Took A License
Kraken can do this thanks to a deal it made this year. Its parent firm, Payward, bought a company called Bitnomial.
That deal came with the licenses Kraken needed. Bitnomial was already cleared to run as an exchange, a clearing house, and a broker.
All of that comes from the CFTC. The CFTC is the U.S. agency that watches over futures and similar trades.
Its sign-off is the whole point. It lets U.S. traders use a product that mostly lived on offshore platforms like Hyperliquid.
Kraken Pro now puts spot trades, margin, regular futures, and perps in one place. One pool of cash can back both the futures and the perps.
Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the goal is to run all of it from a single account. That setup is rare in the U.S., since few firms hold all three licenses at once.
A Market Coming Onshore
For years, the biggest crypto traders went abroad to trade perps. U.S. rules left little room for them at home.
So the volume piled up on sites most Americans could not touch. In 2025 alone, perps drew more than $60 trillion in trades worldwide.
Much of that ran through fast-growing offshore venues. U.S. customers were mostly locked out of them.
Now that wall is starting to fall. The CFTC says clear rules for crypto perps are coming soon.
Other exchanges are racing to launch their own perps too. Rival Coinbase has been pushing into the same space, so the fight for U.S. traders is on.
Some on Wall Street see this as crypto's next big step. They compare it to the launch of the bitcoin ETF.
What To Watch
That huge market gives U.S. officials a strong reason to keep going. The next sign is whether more coins and bigger trades follow.
Kraken also plans to let traders use more kinds of assets to back a bet over time.
Who can trade still depends on where you live. For years this trade sat offshore, and now it has a home in the U.S.
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