$90 Trillion Crypto Perpetual Market: Former Regulators Want to Bring It Back to the U.S.

Ninety trillion dollars on the run. Five former U.S. regulators, including a former CFTC chairman, submitted a joint letter to the SEC and CFTC at the end of August, calling for a regulatory framework based on actual risk rather than fear of risk. The target: perpetual contracts, these derivative products without an expiration date that have become the dominant format in crypto trading but thrive almost entirely outside U.S. borders. The demand has never disappeared; it has just changed addresses. Key points of this article:

• Five former U.S. regulators submitted a letter to the SEC and CFTC calling for a regulatory framework suited to perpetual contracts, a $90 trillion market largely offshore.
• The letter aims to encourage the return of this liquidity to U.S. soil by adjusting regulation to actual risk rather than excessive constraints.
  A perpetual contract is a derivative product that bets on the price of an asset without ever expiring, unlike a traditional future tied to a delivery date. In other words, it’s a leveraged bet that can be kept open indefinitely, as long as the financing to keep it aligned with the spot price is paid. This format has become the norm for crypto trading elsewhere in the world. In the U.S., regulation has long kept it at bay.
  According to estimates from Kalshi, the predictive betting platform that has been offering crypto perpetuals since this year, the offshore volume has increased from $28 trillion to over $90 trillion between 2023 and 2025. A tripling in two years. The letter submitted to the SEC responds to a joint consultation launched in June by the two agencies, intended to clarify where one agency's jurisdiction ends and the other's begins for swaps and emerging derivatives.
  The signatories are not unknowns. Chris Giancarlo (former CFTC chairman), Brian Quintenz and Sharon Brown-Hruska (both former commissioners of the same agency), Steven Wallman (former SEC commissioner), and Chester Spatt (former SEC chief economist): five careers that span both agencies without a common partisan label. This is precisely the argument put forward. Protecting investors and keeping U.S. markets competitive has never been, they remind, a left or right issue.
  Kalshi sponsored the initiative by commissioning the Bellementis firm for the drafting. To be clear, no signatory claims to have received a dime, and the platform had no editorial control over the final content. However, Kalshi's name on the invoice deserves to be known by the reader, not just slipped in at the bottom of the page. Chris Giancarlo sums up the stakes bluntly: << The $90 trillion offshore perpetual market is not a mystery to solve; it is a market waiting for a sensible U.S. framework. If federal regulation is calibrated to actual risk rather than maximum constraint, this liquidity will come back to us. Every year of waiting makes repatriation more difficult >>, he stated to Crypto In America.
  The letter comes as several cases progress in parallel. Donald Trump claimed in early August that Michael Selig, the chairman of the CFTC, was actively working to land Hyperliquid on U.S. soil. It remains the largest offshore exchange in the sector.
  None of these cases alone guarantees the repatriation promised by the letter. However, three initiatives have advanced in just four months: the CFTC framework at the end of May, the bipartisan letter at the end of August, and the SEC roundtable on September 17. All of this without the Clarity Act, still stalled in Congress. Hyperliquid, in fact, is already facing resistance from the CME and NYSE in its own attempt to return to U.S. soil.

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