Payward builds the onshore perp out of licenses it bought

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, said Wednesday that it plans to give U.S. clients access to onchain perpetual futures markets, CoinDesk reported, beginning with Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets — a structure through which third parties deploy and administer their own permissioned perpetual futures contracts. The contracts would list under the rules of Bitnomial Exchange, Payward's designated contract market and a CFTC-regulated venue, subject to regulatory approval; Payward's stated aim is to become the first registered U.S. exchange to deploy markets on the Hyperliquid protocol.

Perpetual futures have largely traded outside U.S. regulated markets since their 2016 debut, and the outside volume has grown hard to call marginal: more than $85 trillion changed hands worldwide in 2025, according to CoinGecko's 2026 State of Crypto Perpetuals Report, while Hyperliquid's decentralized exchange settles roughly 9% of all open perp positions worldwide, which makes the onchain book Payward wants U.S. clients to reach a meaningful share of the product's open interest. The instrument itself is a derivative on a digital asset's price that never expires, held open with periodic funding payments — a decade-old product that has mostly lived where U.S. customers could not reach it.

The mechanics run through entities Payward already owns: a U.S. client would open a futures account with NinjaTrader Clearing, Payward's registered futures commission merchant, and that account would need approval from both NinjaTrader Clearing and Bitnomial. Matching and recordkeeping would stay on Hyperliquid's public blockchain, where the onchain order book records trades, while Bitnomial Exchange and the Bitnomial Clearinghouse would act as the HIP-3 deployer — creating, owning and administering the market and clearing and settling its contracts.

"A U.S. client would open a futures account with Payward's registered broker and trade new perpetual futures contracts on Hyperliquid, cleared through the same clearinghouse that already supports the crypto perpetual contracts Payward offers U.S. clients today," said Jon Pham, Payward's head of U.S. derivatives.

Payward has spent two years buying the pieces this product needs, acquiring Bitnomial in May for $550 million and NinjaTrader Clearing for $1.5 billion in 2025; the perp plan is where those three registrations have to work together — a CFTC-regulated exchange, a clearinghouse, and a futures commission merchant to carry the client account. The purchases were the strategy; the announcement is the test of whether the pieces fit.

As this publication has argued since the Senate's Clarity Act died on a 49-50 cloture vote, market-structure definitions now rest with the SEC and the CFTC — rules quicker to write and quicker to reverse than a statute, revocable by a change in commission rather than a change in law. Payward is not asking Congress for a perp framework; it is assembling one out of licenses it owns, and the only body that has to agree is the agency that already regulates Bitnomial Exchange.

In August the White House backed a CFTC push to onshore Hyperliquid, and the U.S. perp path ran through Bitnomial. What was described then differs from what Payward is proposing now: the earlier talks concerned putting Hyperliquid's permissionless perpetuals on Bitnomial's regulated exchange, while HIP-3 markets are permissioned, deployed and administered by a third party — here, the exchange and clearinghouse that would also clear and settle them. The regulated version of Hyperliquid, on this plan, is a curated market rather than the open protocol, the compromise that makes a CFTC listing defensible and leaves the protocol's permissionless character outside the door.

Against all that, the economics are undisclosed: Payward did not release a fee schedule, expected trading volumes, the terms of any economic arrangement with Hyperliquid, or a launch date. Hyperliquid's own numbers give it a reason to want the arrangement: DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk put Hyperliquid's revenue at about $202 million, down 43%, the kind of decline that makes a regulated stream of U.S. client flow valuable. What Payward pays for that flow, if anything, is the part left open.

The approval is the product. A HIP-3 deployer is a permissioned market that a registered exchange creates, owns and administers, so if the CFTC lets these contracts trade under Bitnomial's rules, it will have blessed an arrangement in which an offshore public blockchain keeps the order book and a U.S. DCM keeps the accountability. That is a template, and it is revocable the way agency accommodations are — it survives as long as the commissioners who wrote it.

The consequence lands on any venue that wants U.S. perp clients: Payward has now shown the entry price — a DCM, a clearinghouse and an FCM, all three already on its books. The first listing approval and the terms attached to it will determine, more than any launch date, whether an onchain order book reaches U.S. screens on conditions the rest of the industry can copy.