We welcome today’s CFTC actions: approval of the first U.S.-listed perpetual derivatives contract, an accompanying Commission policy statement on the listing of perpetual derivatives, related interpretive guidance and no-action relief from the Market Participants Division, and a Staff Advisory on 24/7 Trading, Clearing, and Settlement, as a long-overdue acknowledgment that perpetual derivatives are a legitimate and essential tool for price discovery and risk management.
For too long, regulatory ambiguity drove these markets offshore, depriving American traders and institutions of access to regulated venues and undermining U.S. competitiveness in the global derivatives markets.
Today’s actions chart a new path forward. We look forward to engaging closely with the Commission to ensure that the framework it develops is workable not only for centralized intermediaries, but for the onchain protocols where the most significant perpetuals activity actually occurs.
Extended end of Q1 update
[TLDR]
- Multi-asset collateral launching soon
- TradFi expansion accelerating (>25 markets live, partnership coming, focused on distribution via TradFi brokers)
- Becoming more institutional-ready (pricing methodology, trading workflows)
- Building decentralised, high-throughput sequencing
[Product]
The team has completed development of multi-asset collateral margin. It is now in the testing phase on testnet and undergoing smart contract audits. We expect to launch at the end of April or early May, with support for wBTC, ETH, USDT and potentially EURC as collateral, subject to underlying liquidity.
In Q1, we also doubled down on our TradFi offering, expanding to 25+ equities, indices, FX markets and commodities with competitive liquidity. We are currently finalising an agreement with a major TradFi broker, which will both broaden our offering and help bring in flow.
The other priority for the team is making Extended more institutional-friendly across both product and trading:
- Improving the definition and transparency of fair reference pricing for TradFi markets, with a consistent and clear methodology: spot-based references for equities and FX, and futures-derived pricing for commodities and energy
- Introducing and better communicating institutional-grade features such as MPC wallet workflows, API key-only trading, and our sub-account architecture
In addition:
- With multi-asset collateral, we have built native spot markets (required to process liquidations of non-USDC balances). These will be released shortly after the cross-asset rollout.
- The team is progressing towards decentralising sequencing via an application-specific chain built on a high-throughput implementation of full BFT consensus (targeting ~50ms block times and hundreds of thousands of transactions per second).
This architecture introduces an app-chain layered on top of our existing zk-enabled stack, enabling decentralised matching and related services while preserving existing security guarantees. More details and timelines will be shared soon. Importantly, this design enables Extended tokenomics and revenue accrual to the token.
[Growth and community]
Our strategy remains consistent:
- Stay open to feedback
- Continuously iterate on the product
- Encourage organic usage
- Do not do paid marketing or paid deals
- Focus on long-term sustainability and value creation
Over the past quarter, we have gained stronger conviction that demand for perpetuals is increasing among traditional players, driven by 24/7 trading, higher leverage and deeper liquidity. As a result, we are doubling down on business development with TradFi brokers (fintechs and trading platforms). This is a long-term effort, but we believe it will be a key driver of sustainable growth.
We also have several important integrations with trading terminals coming up, both retail and institutional.
[Team]
Over the past quarter, we hired 3 new team members and are now a team of 14. As we move towards decentralising sequencing, we expect to grow to 18-20 people in the coming months.
[Market and exchange metrics]
Nothing unexpected: January saw all-time highs across key metrics, followed by a broader market slowdown in February and March. All Extended metrics are public: https://t.co/ApTdGaTEOM
From our perspective, short-term market conditions are less important than long-term trends. What matters is that the market we are building in continues to grow and there is room for new players. We strongly believe this is the case:
- price discovery for TradFi assets is likely to increasingly shift towards perpetuals. More on this here: https://t.co/PyefvylBIJ
- DeFi continues to gain share versus CeFi
- Regulatory clarity is improving across both the US and Europe
Crypto traders flocked to the Hyperliquid exchange to hedge commodities as the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran erupted https://t.co/qelCgeERhP
[ ZOOMER ]
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