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Trump signals US CFTC push to bring Hyperliquid onshore
Hyperliquid has processed more than $114 billion in August perpetual futures volume and holds open interest above $10 billion, putting CFTC clarity efforts in the spotlight.
President Donald Trump said Aug. 19 that CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring Hyperliquid to the US in a fully compliant, legal way, after the platform’s interface has kept US persons off it. The move would target the regulatory gap that helped the on-chain perpetuals venue grow largely outside American oversight.
The update comes as Hyperliquid reported that it processed more than $114 billion in perpetual futures trading volume in August, with open interest above $10 billion, and it has surpassed $5 trillion in cumulative perpetual volume. The protocol also generates close to $50 million in monthly fees, underscoring the scale of the on-chain venue at the center of the potential policy shift.
Speaking at the CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee on Aug. 20, Selig said that if the CLARITY Act stalls in Congress, the agency would use its existing authority to start building a crypto market regime. He described exploring rules that could designate both current registrants and non-registrant exchanges as a type of designated contract market called a crypto asset market, which would allow leveraged or margined trading under rules designed for crypto.
Selig also said staff would engage directly with developers of on-chain finance protocols to find legal, compliant ways to offer them inside the US. Hyperliquid has become a test case because its wallet-native, on-chain architecture does not map cleanly to centralized US brokerage categories, and regulators previously addressed a narrower version of the issue when the CFTC approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP in May.