CME Group to Sue the CFTC Over Crypto Perps for Kalshi

CME Group will sue the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over its approval of crypto perps in the US, CEO Terrence Duffy announced on CNBC. Duffy, who steps down in March 2027, said he has spent eight months building the case with his board and will not back down.

The CFTC approved prediction market platform Kalshi in late May to offer Bitcoin perpetual futures, the first time the product class was permitted on a US-regulated exchange. Perpetual futures, commonly known as perps, are contracts with no expiration date, letting traders speculate on price movements indefinitely without owning the underlying asset.

CME’s Case: Perps Are Swaps, Not Futures

CME’s legal argument rests on the Dodd-Frank Act, the financial reform law passed after the 2008 crash. CME argues that perps meet the legal definition of a swap, a bilateral contract traded directly between parties rather than on a public exchange, not a futures contract, and that the CFTC approved the wrong product type for the wrong kind of venue.

CME says it holds exclusive benchmark licenses for major price indices, and if crypto perps qualify as swaps, CME argues, any contract referencing those benchmarks must route through its infrastructure.

“We have an exclusive license with every single provider of the benchmarks,” Duffy told CNBC’s Fast Money. “They would have to list them as swaps, if that’s the way it came out.”

CME plans to file the lawsuit on June 18. CFTC chair Michael Selig had earlier told the same program: “It’s time to approve regulated futures contracts that have no expiration date.”

Kalshi’s Bitcoin perp crossed $1 billion in trading volume within days of its May launch, a milestone its original prediction market business took 40 months to reach.

What’s the CME Lawsuit Impact?

Before May 2026, no US-regulated platform offered crypto perps, pushing American traders toward offshore exchanges to access the product. The CFTC’s approval of Kalshi, and then Coinbase, opened that market for the first time.

If CME wins, the US perps market faces two scenarios: the product gets blocked entirely, or it gets reclassified as a swap and rerouted through CME’s own rails. Traders who have already moved to the new platforms face an uncertain timeline.

Crypto perps grew faster than any product in Kalshi’s history, and the CFTC approved them anyway. Now the oldest institution in US derivatives trading wants them rerouted through its own infrastructure. The courts decide next.