The Securities and Exchange Commission is entering the developing controversy surrounding whether its partner agency ought to have greenlit perpetual derivatives on individual equities within the United States.
This week, the SEC submitted an amicus brief, which is a legal filing backing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission following a lawsuit filed against it last week by the Capital Markets Alliance aimed at reversing the authorization of those instruments. The CMA represents an industry trade group whose participants feature entities like Cboe and Citadel Securities.
The SEC contested the CMA’s claim that the CFTC has “gone rogue.” Furthermore, recent regulatory adjustments by the CFTC remain open to SEC evaluation, and the SEC emphasized that it frequently works alongside the CFTC, a relationship crucial for supervising equity perpetual instruments, according to the submission.
“The SEC’s amicus brief addresses why that depiction—of a CFTC gone rogue, and an SEC gone missing—is mistaken,” the agency explained.
Within its legal complaint, the CMA asserted that the CFTC breached the Administrative Procedure Act—the legislation regulating how government bodies formulate regulations—because these perpetual derivatives ought to fall under the authority of the SEC. The CMA additionally contended that the CFTC failed to justify its choice, requesting that the judiciary “vacate the approvals.”
Following those events, a coalition of digital asset companies consisting of Coinbase, Kraken parent organization Payward, Kalshi, DRW Holdings, Paradigm, and Jump Trading submitted a joint amicus brief opposing the CMA. Three among those entities—Coinbase, Kalshi, and Payward—have presented proposals to the CFTC to offer equity perps tied to U.S. stocks, with those filings achieving approved status on November 2.
Additional parties have likewise submitted amicus briefs, including the financial advocacy group Better Markets as well as former SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who argued that these fresh perpetual products should fall under SEC oversight.
“Although labeled by the CFTC and these trading platforms as ‘perpetual futures,’ these products are in fact securities swaps that are supposed to be regulated by the SEC with strong investor protections,” Better Markets expressed in a statement on Tuesday. “That’s because these types of financial products contributed to the 2008 crash and pose an unreasonably high risk of causing total losses to retail investors.”
Originally published at https://www.theblock.co/news/regulation/2026-11-11-sec-enters-fight-who-regulates-perpetual-derivatives-stocks-in-us-438427.
