The president said CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring the geoblocked perpetual futures venue into the US “in a fully compliant and legal fashion,” sending HYPE and Hyperliquid Strategies shares up and CME and Cboe down.
President Donald Trump said CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion, putting the White House behind a domestic path for a perpetual futures venue that currently geoblocks American traders.
Trump made the remark Wednesday at a White House event alongside agency heads and exchange executives, including ICE Chief Executive Jeffrey Sprecher, whose company spent the spring pressing regulators to rein the platform in.
Onshoring Hyperliquid would place a non-custodial protocol inside the rulebook that governs CME and ICE, a question the CFTC has so far answered one product at a time, without rulemaking. It would also resolve, in Hyperliquid’s favor, the campaign incumbent exchanges have run since May to bring the platform under federal oversight or keep it away from US customers.
HYPE traded near $69.56 late Wednesday, up about 19% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. Hyperliquid Strategies, the Nasdaq-listed HYPE treasury company that trades as PURR, closed up 30.4% at $9.39, its largest single-day gain on record. CME Group and Cboe Global Markets fell as much as 3.4% and 6.1% during the session before closing down 1.7% and 3.5%.
“I understand that Mike is also working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion, working very hard on that,” Trump said.
Selig was in the room, along with SEC Chair Paul Atkins, Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong, Ripple Chief Executive Brad Garlinghouse, Nasdaq Chief Executive Adena Friedman, Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev, Kraken co-Chief Executive Arjun Sethi, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, Gemini’s Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon.
Calls Before The Comment
Options volume in Hyperliquid Strategies ran nearly eight times its 30-day average on Wednesday, with more than 120,000 call contracts trading against fewer than 8,000 puts and about $10 million in premium spent, CNBC reported on the call-buying. One trade landed before Trump spoke. Around 11 a.m., a buyer paid $65,000 for 719 calls struck at $8 and expiring in mid-October, contracts that went from 90 cents to $2.45 by the close. Thirty minutes after the remarks, another buyer took 2,000 $8-strike calls expiring in November and December for about $510,000.
Dennis DeWitt, co-founder of Millbank Dartmoor Portsmouth, raised the possibility that someone had advance knowledge of the announcement. CNBC framed the point as speculation.
Geoblocked And Growing
Hyperliquid blocks users in the US and in Ontario, Canada, while the underlying protocol stays permissionless. The venue cleared $6.19 billion in perpetuals volume over the past 24 hours and $177.9 billion over 30 days, with $11.72 billion in open interest and $41.8 million in fees across the same month, according to DefiLlama figures. Cumulative volume since launch is $5.08 trillion. None of it comes from US retail accounts.
The platform’s allies have been laying groundwork for a domestic opening since February, when Jake Chervinsky launched the Hyperliquid Policy Center in Washington on 1 million HYPE from the Hyper Foundation. Founder Jeff Yan endorsed the effort at the time, and in July the center filed a joint comment with Phantom arguing the CFTC’s exchange and broker registration rules should attach only to entities that handle customer orders or funds, not to onchain protocol software or non-custodial wallets.
The Incumbents’ Objection
CME and ICE went to regulators on May 15 over Hyperliquid’s 24/7 onchain oil perpetuals, arguing the contracts carried manipulation risk and belonged under federal supervision. CME escalated on June 18, suing the CFTC and Selig over the Kalshi approval in the District of Columbia on the theory that Dodd-Frank classifies funding-rate contracts as swaps rather than futures. That case is pending. Three weeks later the CFTC stayed CME’s own self-certified 24/7 crude oil contract pending fuller review, with Selig calling the exchange’s move “wholly inappropriate.”
Selig’s Offshore Argument
Selig cleared the first true bitcoin perpetual on a CFTC-registered exchange on May 29 and has framed that decision as a jurisdictional one.
“The question was never whether crypto asset perpetual contracts would exist. Instead, the question was whether they would exist under American oversight, American standards and American rule of law,” he wrote in a statement issued the same day. He called the prior enforcement-led posture decelerationist and said it forced American innovators to flee the US.
Selig convenes the CFTC’s first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting in Washington on Thursday, with crypto assets, artificial intelligence and prediction markets on the agenda.
Clarity Act Push
Trump used the same event to press the Senate on the Clarity Act.
“Now we need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act, a fair version of the Clarity Act,” he said, calling it “very, very powerful structure legislation which will keep us ahead of China.”
The bill returns to the floor in September and needs roughly six Democratic votes to reach 60, a threshold prediction market traders have repeatedly pushed into 2027.
Nothing Trump said commits the agency to a timetable. The CFTC has not opened a public docket on Hyperliquid, no registration application has surfaced, and the mechanics of applying customer-protection, identity-verification and leverage rules to a venue that never takes custody of user funds remain unsettled.