Single-Stock Futures Are Coming Back to US Traders

A Product That Basically Died in 2020 Is Being Restarted

Crypto.com's derivatives exchange Nadex — the North American Derivatives Exchange — filed a Form 1-N notice registration with the SEC on September 14, 2026 to trade security futures products. The SEC acknowledged receipt on September 16.

One thing to get right up front, because a lot of coverage blurred it: this was not an approval. Under Section 6(g)(2)(B), notice registration becomes effective contemporaneously with submission. The SEC did not vote on the exchange or on any product. It is a filing that took effect, not a decision that was made.

• Filing: Form 1-N notice registration by Nadex, submitted and effective September 14, 2026; SEC acknowledgment September 16
• Now authorized: single-stock futures in the US
• Still pending: single-stock perpetual futures, which need both SEC and CFTC sign-off
• Not alone: Coinbase filed its own notice registration earlier in September, also targeting equity perpetuals

What Is a Single-Stock Future, and Why Did They Disappear?

A single-stock future is a contract to buy or sell shares of one specific company at a set price on a future date. They traded in the US on OneChicago from 2002 until that exchange wound down in 2020, and volumes were never large enough to sustain it.

The reason is regulatory plumbing rather than lack of demand. Single-stock futures sit at the intersection of securities law and commodities law, which means they are jointly regulated by the SEC and the CFTC. Dual regulation meant dual registration, dual rulebooks, and margin treatment that was less attractive than the alternatives. Traders who wanted leveraged single-name exposure used options instead, and the product withered.

What has changed is not the law but the operators. Crypto derivatives venues have spent years building perpetual futures infrastructure, and they are now pointing it at equities. CEO Kris Marszalek said the company is working with both the SEC and the CFTC to offer single-stock perpetuals in the US, describing it as combining digital asset market innovations with US capital markets.

What Would Single-Stock Perpetuals Actually Change?

Perpetual futures have no expiry date. Instead of rolling a position quarterly, a funding rate paid between long and short holders keeps the contract price tethered to the underlying. Crypto markets adopted them almost universally because they remove expiry management entirely.

For an equity trader, the practical difference is that a directional position stops having a calendar attached to it. No roll, no expiry week, no term structure to reason about. Whether that is an improvement depends entirely on the trader — funding rates are a real cost that can grind down a position held through an unfavourable regime, and a product with no expiry is a product with no forced moment of reckoning. That is a feature for some and a trap for others.

Worth being clear that none of this is approved yet. Perpetuals need both agencies, and neither has signalled a timeline.

Who Else Is In This Race?

Coinbase filed a similar notice registration earlier in September, also seeking to list equity perpetual futures. Robinhood is adjacent to the Crypto.com effort too — it already routes event contracts through OG.com, the venue Nadex sits under, and agreed to take equity stakes in both companies following OG.com's spin-off, which we covered when Robinhood tapped OG.com for prediction market clearing.

The broader context is a US market structure that keeps inching toward always-on, product-agnostic trading — the same direction as the SEC's 24-hour trading roundtable and the tokenized equity efforts we have tracked in our markets coverage. For retail traders the honest takeaway is: more instruments are coming, they carry leverage and funding costs that behave differently from options, and the time to understand the mechanics is before the marketing arrives, not after.

Sources: SEC Acknowledgement of Receipt of Notice of Registration (34-106396) — September 16, 2026; The Block — September 17, 2026.