Regulated Perps Access by Jurisdiction 2026

Introduction

Legal prohibition and geo-blocking are different constraints with different consequences, and almost every round-up of this subject reports one while measuring the other. A prohibition binds a firm and follows from a rule, so it survives a change of address and a virtual private network. A block is a commercial decision recorded in a contract, so it can be narrower than the law, wider than the law, or unrelated to it. Both matter to a reader; conflating them produces confident answers that are wrong in either direction.

Every regulatory claim below is taken from the regulator's own rule text, register or published statement. Every availability claim is taken from the venue's own contractual documents. Where the two disagree, both are printed and neither is explained away.

One methodological rule earned its place during the research, because it changed an answer late. For availability and restriction claims the terms of service or service agreement is the source, and a help-centre article is a secondary rendering of it. A help-centre page and a contractual terms document gave different answers about the same venue and the same region: the contract named a European country the help page did not. Reading the venue's documentation was not a tight enough standard, because it admitted the surface that was wrong.

A negative claim carries its search bound wherever one appears below. Stating that a venue's own documents record no derivatives product, or that a register holds no entry for a group, is a claim about what was read rather than about what exists, so the documents searched and the date they were read are named alongside it. Where a venue's own two pages enumerate different restricted jurisdictions, this page enumerates from neither, because reproducing either list would contradict the other.

Three things are out of scope. No venue is recommended, no leverage figure or strategy appears, and nothing here is legal advice. The mechanism of these contracts sits elsewhere in this cluster: the instrument itself in our complete guide to DeFi derivatives, the funding calculation in our page on funding rates, and the venue architecture in our comparison of market structures.

Dates carry more weight here than anywhere else in this cluster, and the facts below decay at three different speeds. Some are dated events or rule text and change only by amendment. Some were true when they were collected and are expected to drift, so they carry their date in the sentence. One is currently true and subject to a live court case that could reverse it outright, which is a binary on a court's schedule rather than a slow drift. Everything below was read at source on 13 August 2026.

United States: open, and under legal challenge

The onshore route this page describes opened during June 2026, on the back of two documents the CFTC issued on 29 May 2026. That is deliberately narrower than the claim usually made for the date. A longer-dated product marketed in perpetual style is reported to have been offered to US customers considerably earlier, and the venue's own pages could not be retrieved to confirm the expiry length, so this page states nothing either way about it. The route below is the one that was verified.

What the CFTC did on 29 May 2026

The Policy Statement Concerning the Listing of Perpetual Contracts defines the instrument by mechanism rather than by name. It describes contracts with "no fixed expiration date, and which rely on a periodic funding rate mechanism", and sets them against ordinary futures, which it says "rely primarily on a fixed expiration date to achieve convergence". That definitional sentence is the most useful one on the whole page, because it is the test every other jurisdiction's product has to be measured against.

The contemporaneous order is cited by name inside the policy statement itself, as an order approving a KalshiEX bitcoin perpetual futures contract and dated 29 May 2026. The Commission's press release for that day records that it "issued an Order for Approval to KalshiEX, LLC" for the contract. A staff advisory issued the same day, letter 26-16, addresses "24/7 trading, clearing, and settlement" and came jointly from three divisions. The policy statement was subsequently published in the Federal Register on 3 June 2026 under document number 2026-11020; the substantive text quoted here was read from the Commission-approved version rather than from that publication.

The access dates are not the rule date

Approval day was not the day anybody could trade, and reader-facing pages routinely print the regulatory date as though it were the access date. The approved contract went live on 3 June 2026. A second route arrived around 15 June 2026. Kraken announced then that "Eligible US clients can now trade perpetual futures on Kraken Pro", with the contracts "listed on Bitnomial, a CFTC-regulated exchange recently acquired by Kraken's parent company, Payward." The venue's own description of the product is a conventional one: "continuous pricing, no expiration and an eight-hour funding rate, matching the conventional structure for crypto perpetuals".

The word carrying the weight in that announcement is Eligible. It is a scoped permission, and the scope is a venue's own eligibility screen rather than a statement about every US resident. Approval of a contract is not the same fact as availability to a person.

Letter 26-17 carries two holdings

The CFTC letter usually summarised as a no-action position treating one offshore venue's perpetuals as foreign futures actually contains two separate holdings, and fusing them produces a claim neither document supports. The categorisation is an interpretation: the Division "confirms that the Deribit Perpetuals may be categorized as foreign futures", Deribit being described in the same letter as "a Virtual Asset Service Provider regulated by the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority."

The no-action limb answers a different question. It concerns an intermediary that "posts customer-owned digital commodities and payment stablecoins" as margin with an affiliated foreign broker under a right of re-use. One holding is about what the instrument is; the other is about where customer collateral may sit and on what terms. Only through a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant may a US customer reach those contracts at all, which is what makes them foreign futures rather than a direct offshore route.

The case that could vacate all of it

Every sentence above is conditional on a proceeding that was undecided when this page was written. Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. v. CFTC, No. 1:26-cv-02157 (D.D.C., filed 18 June 2026), asks the court to vacate both the order and the policy statement and to declare that perpetual contracts are swaps. No stay was found, and trading continued as at 13 August 2026.

This is not a footnote to the section, it is a condition on it. Open here means open and under challenge, and the classification is not settled merely because it is currently in force. It is also the fastest-moving fact on this page by an order of magnitude: everything else drifts over quarters, whereas this resolves on a court's schedule and could invert the section between one refresh and the next. A reader should treat the US row as current rather than as decided.

No US derivatives route through OKX

No derivatives product of any kind appears on OKX's US platform. Its US risk and compliance disclosures state that "OKX US offers spot trading and buy/sell/convert (over-the-counter) services and products", and its US terms describe the service as "a platform for spot trading digital assets".

This is a negative claim, so the search behind it is stated. Four OKX-published documents were read for any futures, derivative or perpetual product: the US terms of service, the US risk and compliance disclosures, the US licences page and the global risk and compliance disclosure. All four were current within the previous eight weeks, and none of them documents such a product.

No US resident reaches the global platform either. OKX's own terms assign US residents to a Delaware corporation trading as OKX US, and route every other user to a separate Seychelles-registered company. The entity split is the mechanism, and it does what a geo-block cannot: it is written into the contract rather than applied at the network edge.

OKX US also bars residents of several states and territories, and OKX's own two pages do not agree on which. The licences page, updated 8 August 2026, enumerates six jurisdictions and omits Puerto Rico; the global risk and compliance disclosure, updated 8 July 2026, restricts all US territories and names Puerto Rico first among them. Enumerating from either source contradicts the other, so this page does not enumerate. Three different state lists are in circulation on affiliate round-ups, and each names at least one state that appears in no OKX document at all.

The consequence is the section's outcome rather than a shortfall in it. A US reader has no derivatives route through the partners this page is able to write about, so the United States section carries no call to action. There is nothing to link to, and inventing one is precisely the failure this page exists to avoid.

United Kingdom: the ban turns on client class

Retail is prohibited, professionals are not

UK retail clients cannot buy crypto derivatives from any firm acting in, or from, the UK. The prohibition sits in the FCA Handbook at COBS 22.6.5R, which states that a firm "must not: (a) sell a cryptoasset derivative" to a retail client, and it has been in force since 6 January 2021.

The line is drawn by client category rather than by residence, and the regulator said so when it made the rule: "So we are not extending the prohibition to professional clients." An elective professional client therefore falls outside the ban that a retail client falls inside, on the same platform, in the same country, on the same day.

The second half of that sentence has to travel with the first, because on its own it produces a new error in place of the old one. The rule's scope is territorial as to the firm: the FCA described the measure as banning sale, marketing and distribution to retail consumers "by firms acting in, or from, the UK". Client class decides who may be sold to; the firm's location decides which firms are bound. Neither half is the whole rule, and a reader arriving to check whether they can trade in the UK needs both in the same breath.

The ten-trade test is FCA law, not policy

Elective professional status requires a firm-level assessment plus a threshold test. The assessment is an "adequate assessment of the expertise, experience and knowledge of the client". The test then requires two of three criteria:

• Average trading frequency of "10 per quarter over the previous four quarters" in significant size.
• A portfolio, "defined as including cash deposits and financial instruments", that "exceeds EUR 500,000".
• The client "works or has worked in the financial sector for at least one year".

The firm must also "give the client a clear written warning of the protections" being given up, and take a written confirmation back.

The ten-per-quarter figure is not a venue's house rule. It is FCA Handbook COBS 3.5.3R(2)(a), a binding regulation, and describing it as an exchange's own threshold is the single most common error made about this route. Venues do add genuinely operational glosses on top: one UK-facing venue states that "Only persons who were classified as professional clients can trade derivatives of crypto assets" and layers on its own minimum trade sizes of £10,000 and £40,000 depending on asset class. Those minimums belong to the venue. The frequency belongs to the regulator.

The distinction is not pedantry. Presenting a regulatory threshold as a venue preference implies that a different venue would apply a different threshold, which is venue-shopping, and the FCA has named exactly that behaviour as a supervisory priority.

What the FCA has not yet published

Consultation paper CP25/36 proposes to "Remove the current COBS 3.5.3R(2) 'quantitative test'" — deletion rather than adjustment, so if the proposal is made final the three-criteria test ceases to exist rather than changing shape. The alternative route consulted on is a wealth threshold, "investable assets (a portfolio of designated investments and/or cash) of at least £10 million", offered as an alternative to the structured qualitative assessment rather than as an addition to it.

The consultation was published on 8 December 2025 and closed on 2 February 2026. The FCA says it will "issue a Policy Statement once we have reviewed your comments" and has published no date for final rules. This page therefore carries no expected date, because there is none to carry: every timetable in circulation for this change is somebody's inference.

One more thing travels with the route. When the FCA made the retail ban it identified as supervisory concerns firms "inappropriately 'opting up' retail clients to become elective professional clients" and firms "moving retail consumers to associated non-UK entities". That statement dates from October 2020 and remains live policy rather than a recent intervention. This page describes the route because a reader needs to know it exists; it does not recommend taking it. Bybit's UK position, including how the professional exemption interacts with what that venue actually offers to UK users, is set out in our Bybit platform guide.

The new regime is not in force yet

The UK does not yet regulate cryptoassets under its new regime, and a page written in the present tense about it is wrong by more than a year. The statutory instrument was "Made 4th February 2026", but its own first regulation states that "Subject to paragraph (3) these Regulations come into force on 25th October 2027".

The FCA published final rules and guidance on 30 June 2026, and says "the application period will open on 30 September 2026", hedging the date with an expectation rather than a commitment. It closes on 28 February 2027, and that closing date has to travel with the opening one or firms read an open-ended window where a five-month one exists. Until commencement, the operative UK constraint on this page's subject remains the retail derivatives prohibition, not the incoming regime.

The ETN change left derivatives alone

Only crypto exchange traded notes listed on a UK Recognised Investment Exchange became available to retail investors, and that change came into force on 8 October 2025. The FCA's condition is explicit: such a product "must be traded on an FCA-approved, UK-based investment exchange (a Recognised Investment Exchange or RIE)". The same announcement states that "The FCA's ban on retail access to cryptoasset derivatives will remain in place."

So the word unbanned is wrong twice over. It describes a different product surface, and it describes it too broadly, because the Handbook as amended still prohibits selling "a cryptoasset derivative or a non-UK RIE cryptoasset exchange traded note to a retail client". A prohibition was narrowed by one carve-out; nothing was lifted.

European Union: MiCA authorisation is the wrong permission

A MiCA licence does not permit perpetuals

A MiCA licence does not permit perpetual futures, and the regulation rules itself out in its own scope article. Article 2(4)(a) provides that "This Regulation does not apply to crypto-assets that qualify as one or more of the following: (a) financial instruments;". A contract of this kind is a MiFID II financial instrument, so the permission it needs is MiFID II investment-firm authorisation and not a crypto-asset service provider authorisation.

That inversion is worth stating flatly because it is the most common one in this area and the most commercially tempting. A register entry showing that a group holds a MiCA authorisation says nothing whatever about whether that group may offer derivatives, and every affiliate page that reads a CASP licence as derivatives permission has published a regulatory claim its own source contradicts.

One Union rule against twenty-seven options

The genuine asymmetry between spot and derivatives in Europe is mechanical rather than a matter of enforcement appetite. On the spot side MiCA imposes a Union-wide authorisation requirement with a hard dated sunset for incumbents: firms that provided services under applicable national law before 30 December 2024 "may continue to do so until 1 July 2026 or until they are granted" or refused authorisation, whichever is sooner. That transitional provision is Article 143(3), not the reverse-solicitation article, and it is a grandfathering deadline rather than a general prohibition — the prohibition is the authorisation requirement itself.

On the derivatives side there is no equivalent single deadline, because the third-country retail regime is a national option. MiFID II Article 39 provides that "A Member State may require that a third-country firm intending to provide investment services" to retail clients establish a branch. The word doing the work there is may. The Union-level regime in MiFIR Article 46 reaches only services provided "to eligible counterparties and to professional clients within the meaning of Section I", and it is conditioned on an equivalence decision that does not cover these venues' home jurisdictions.

So the difference is not an absent rule against a present one. It is one uniform requirement with a date against twenty-seven optional national ones that have largely not been switched on. Nor is it explained by a missing reverse-solicitation carve-out on the securities side: MiFID II Article 42 is headed "Provision of services at the exclusive initiative of the client", it is the direct analogue of MiCA's Article 61, and it predates MiCA by nine years.

What ESMA said, and how hedged it was

ESMA addressed these products directly in a public statement of 24 February 2026, reference ESMA35-243228190-8024, and two features of it are routinely dropped. The first is a hedge: ESMA says such instruments "are likely to fall within the scope" of the product intervention measures, which is a statement of likelihood rather than a classification. The second is attribution: the live restrictions are national rather than ESMA's own, because "all NCAs adopted permanent national PI measures mostly mirroring the mentioned ESMA decision", while ESMA's own 2018 temporary measures lapsed on 31 July 2019. A page saying that ESMA's restrictions apply is wrong on both the instrument and the author.

One sub-claim from the same document is unhedged and useful. ESMA states that a product's commercial name — it lists perpetual futures among its examples — "is irrelevant for the categorisation". The boundary itself is formally open: the European Commission's 2026 MiCA review consultation asks at Question 72 whether these products should "be governed by MiCA or MiFID", and that consultation closes on 30 September 2026.

The EU route is a dated future

Five-year expiry futures, not perpetuals, are what OKX lists to traders in the European Economic Area. Its own contract specifications give every listed contract a term of five years with settlement dates in 2031, and its own explainer describes the products as "five-year expiry crypto futures that use a funding rate mechanism". The brand attached to them is X-Perps, and the brand is the least reliable part of the description, which is why the qualifier belongs in the noun.

Measure that against the definition quoted earlier from the CFTC: a contract with no fixed expiration date, relying on a periodic funding rate. The European instrument keeps the funding mechanism and adds the expiry, which makes it a dated future that behaves like a perpetual between now and 2031 rather than a perpetual. The distinction is the whole point of the corridor, not a technicality on the way to it.

Which entity offers it matters as much as what it is. The derivatives come from OKX Europe Markets Limited, the group's MiFID investment firm, rather than from the separate entity holding its crypto-asset service provider authorisation; the specifications say the products are offered to "investors based in the European Economic Area via OKX Europe Markets Ltd". OKX states that firm's investment services licence number as OEML-15905, which is attributed here to OKX because the national register could not be read to confirm it. The venue's own contract table shows leverage of "Up to 10x" on every listed contract.

Where Bybit stands across the EEA

France is an excluded jurisdiction in Bybit's global terms of service. The live terms document, last updated 23 January 2026, names "excluded jurisdictions including the United States, the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, France", and the clause continues with further jurisdictions including the United Kingdom. A page describing the European position as a withdrawal with no contractual exclusions would be false, and the reason the earlier reading was wrong is instructive: the help-centre article and the contract answered the same question differently, and the contract was the surface that had not been opened.

No EEA-wide exclusion appears in those terms, though. Neither the abbreviation nor the full phrase for the European Economic Area occurs anywhere in the thirty-one page document. What is happening across the region is commercial rather than contractual: an announcement dated 29 June 2026 states that "access to certain services on Bybit Global for EEA residents will be progressively limited".

Bybit's European entity holds no permission to operate a trading platform. The ESMA register of authorised crypto-asset service providers records it with five services from 28 May 2025, and the service described as operation of a trading platform for crypto-assets is not among them — while that same service is present for the OKX entity a few rows away in the same file. The search bound for that negative is the register's own service field for that entity, read on 13 August 2026. Its authorisation also reaches 29 EEA states rather than all 30, because the venue's own notice says "Bybit EU's licenses are not currently passported to Malta".

No Binance entity appears in that register at all, across all 329 entries read on the same date. Reported dates for the withdrawal of a national application and for the halting of regulated services in the region could not be confirmed at a primary source and are therefore not stated here.

Asia-Pacific: registers, frameworks and caps

A DEX and a CEX, listed nine days apart

MAS added Bybit to its Investor Alert List on 17 June 2026 and Hyperliquid on 26 June 2026. Both entries were read at the register's own endpoint rather than in trade press, and they sit at consecutive record numbers, nine days apart.

The second entry names the foundation website and the trading frontend rather than the chain. That detail sharpens the point instead of weakening it: what a regulator reached was the access surface, and an on-chain venue has one as surely as a centralised venue does. Jurisdictional exposure therefore attaches to how a venue is reached, not to how it is built. A reader who moves to a non-custodial architecture in order to change their regulatory position has changed a variable that this register does not read, as our structural comparison of the two architectures sets out in detail.

What the Investor Alert List is

MAS defines the register in its own words, and the definition is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing, because the paraphrases in circulation say more than MAS does. It names entities that "may be or may have been wrongly perceived as being licensed or [...] regulated by MAS", and MAS states that "This list is not exhaustive and is based on what was known to MAS".

Two consequences follow, and they run in opposite directions. Absence proves nothing: MAS's own media release warns that the list "does not mean that the thousands of other entities operating offshore" that are not on it are safe to deal with. And placement is not neutral either, because the same release records one exchange being added after it had solicited Singapore users without a licence. A listing is a warning register entry rather than an enforcement action or a ban, and it is also not a certificate of innocence.

A methodological note belongs with that, because it decides whether a checker finds the entry at all. MAS's own search box returns nothing for one of the largest exchanges on the list, since that record is indexed as a website address rather than as a company name. The entry is real and dated; it is only invisible to the search. Reading the register's full contents, all 918 entries as at 13 August 2026, is the difference between finding it and concluding it does not exist. Across that same full set, OKX returns no match.

Two Bybit facts that do not reconcile

Bybit's own restricted-countries page, last updated on 6 August 2026, states that "Bybit does not offer services or products to Users in a few excluded jurisdictions" and lists Singapore among them. MAS added Bybit to the Investor Alert List on 17 June 2026 regardless. Both statements are primary, both were read at source, and this page prints them side by side rather than resolving one into the other.

Hong Kong has a framework, not a market

No Hong Kong platform may offer perpetual contracts to the public on the strength of the current framework, because the framework invites proposals rather than granting permission. The SFC's policy statement of 11 February 2026 sets out a high-level approach and states that "the SFC welcomes interested Platform Operators to submit their proposed Perp structure".

Where a product does proceed, the paper says "they should only be offered to professional investors", using the statutory definition rather than a threshold of its own. It sets no numeric leverage cap, leaving clients to choose a preferred leverage level. The search bound for the negative is the SFC's policy statements index and its virtual-asset trading platform materials index, both read on 13 August 2026, neither of which records an approved structure.

Two numeric retail caps, both scoped

Australia treats these contracts as derivatives: ASIC's information sheet on crypto-assets covers "futures that reference one or more digital assets, including perpetual futures". Separately, and this is a different instrument, Australian retail leverage on crypto contracts for difference is capped at "2:1 for CFDs referencing crypto-assets" by an ASIC product intervention order.

Those two facts must not be merged into a perpetual-futures leverage cap, because the order addresses contracts for difference. The order is in force and, on the Federal Register of Legislation's own record, ceases on 23 May 2027 — inside this page's likely life, which is a reason to check the date rather than to quote the number.

Dubai caps retail leverage on exchange-traded derivatives at 5-to-1, under a rulebook effective 31 March 2026 whose scope excludes the Dubai International Financial Centre. The cap follows from the margin requirement, since the rule sets initial margin for these products at twenty per cent, and perpetuals are in scope by name: the rulebook defines a Perpetual ETD as "any ETD that does not have a fixed expiry date".

The scope belongs in the sentence rather than after it. The rule-maker regulates Dubai's free zones and mainland with that one carve-out, so this is a Dubai rule; this page states nothing about federal or wider requirements in the United Arab Emirates, which could not be established at a primary source.

Whose restricted list answers the question

One venue distinguishes product-level availability and the other publishes a flat list, and for a reader trying to answer a specific question that difference decides whose page is worth opening. OKX's global risk and compliance disclosure names four countries where derivatives-related services are restricted; in three of those four the restriction is broader than derivatives, extending to centralised-finance services, peer-to-peer services, or both. The clause is also a reservation of right rather than a statement of present fact, since OKX writes that it "may restrict services in other jurisdictions including but not limited to" the countries it goes on to list.

Bybit publishes no derivatives-specific tier at all. The search bound is the full extracted text of its restricted-countries page, 2,581 characters, in which the words derivative, futures, perpetual, margin and leverage do not appear once. That is a real asymmetry in documentation practice, and it is the only row on this page that does not decay when a rule changes, because it describes what a document says rather than what a regulator requires.

Read it as an observation about two venues, though, not as a jurisdictional pattern. Platform available, derivatives not, is true of specific venues and misleading as a general frame, precisely because in most of the cases examined the restriction turned out to be wider than derivatives.

The same disclosure also answers three cells this page cannot answer from regulators: OKX names Canada, Hong Kong and Japan among "Restricted Locations, which at this time include Afghanistan, Canada, Cuba, Hong Kong" and others. That is a venue's decision rather than those countries' law, and it is not presented here as law. Japanese and Canadian rules on retail access to these contracts could not be established at a primary source, so they are absent rather than approximated. Live venue-level data on funding and liquidations, which is what most readers want once the access question is settled, is covered in our CoinGlass review.

The professional qualification pathway

Three regimes, three different tests

One shape recurs across the jurisdictions above: a retail prohibition or restriction with a door in it, and the door is a client category defined by wealth, trading activity or employment. The shape recurs; the tests do not, and the labels are not interchangeable between regimes.

In the UK the category is the elective professional client, and the test is the Handbook one set out earlier: two of three criteria plus a firm-level assessment, with the criteria currently under consultation for deletion. In Hong Kong the category is the professional investor, and the SFC's framework does not restate the threshold at all, referring instead to the definition "As defined in section 1 of Part 1 of Schedule 1" to the Securities and Futures Ordinance.

In Singapore the category is the accredited investor, defined by section 4A(1)(a) of the Securities and Futures Act 2001. An individual qualifies on any one of three limbs: net personal assets that "exceed in value $2 million" in Singapore dollars, financial assets net of related liabilities above one million Singapore dollars, or income of at least three hundred thousand Singapore dollars in the preceding twelve months.

One set of thresholds is deliberately missing. The European Union's elective-professional criteria under MiFID II are not stated on this page, because the consolidated text could not be retrieved during the research behind it. Filling them in from the UK figures would be inference rather than verification: the UK rule is a copy-out of the European one and the numbers may well match, but matching numbers are not evidence, and this is not a page that can afford to guess.

Described, not recommended

Two things about the pathway are easy to miss when it is presented as a workaround. The first is that qualification removes a protection rather than granting a permission. A client who opts up gives away the conduct protections that define the retail category, which is the reason the categories exist at all, and the firm is required to warn them of exactly that in writing.

The second is supervisory. The FCA identified inappropriate opt-ups and the movement of retail consumers to associated non-UK entities as areas of focus at the time it made the retail ban, and both remain live policy. This page sets the route out because a reader deciding what is possible needs to know it exists. It does not suggest taking it, and a page that presents opting up as an ordinary step is describing something the regulator has said it watches for.

Conclusion

Four jurisdictions, four answers, and every one of them carries a scope that cannot be trimmed off without turning it into something false. In the United States an onshore route exists on designated contract markets, it opened during June 2026 rather than on the regulatory date, and it is under a live challenge that asks a court to vacate the framework outright.

In the United Kingdom the prohibition binds firms acting in or from the UK and turns on client categorisation, so a professional client sits outside a ban a retail client sits inside. In the European Union a MiCA authorisation is the wrong permission for these contracts, and the route that does exist there is a dated future rather than a perpetual. In Asia-Pacific a regulator listed a decentralised venue and a centralised one nine days apart, which is the clearest evidence available that architecture does not determine jurisdictional exposure.

Which produces an outcome worth stating plainly, because it is the page's argument rather than an apology for it. The honest answer to "where can I trade this" is short, and every affiliate page that gives a longer one is giving a wrong one. Four jurisdiction sections above carry exactly one monetised link between them, it sits in the European Union section, and it points at an instrument with an expiry date on it. The sparseness is the finding.

Four questions do most of the work if a reader wants to check a claim of this kind themselves. Which class of customer does the rule address, and which class am I in? Where is the firm acting from, since that is what most prohibitions actually bind? Does the instrument have an expiry date, since a name is not a classification and a regulator has said so in terms? And what date does the document carry, given that one fact on this page could be reversed by a court and several others were written to be amended?

The habit underneath all four is smaller. Read the contract rather than the help page, read the register rather than the summary of it, and treat a clean, confident, general sentence about a jurisdiction as the most likely place for a missing qualifier. That is not scepticism for its own sake: of the errors corrected while this page was researched, the largest group were true statements that had simply lost the words that made them true.

Sources

• US CFTC — Policy Statement Concerning the Listing of Perpetual Contracts: the mechanism-based definition, the contrast with dated futures, and the named order of 29 May 2026.
• US CFTC — press release 9240-26: the order for approval issued to KalshiEX for the perpetual bitcoin futures contract on 29 May 2026.
• US CFTC — press release 9239-26: the same-day staff advisory, letter 26-16, on trading, clearing and settlement around the clock.
• US CFTC — interpretative and no-action letter 26-17: the foreign-futures categorisation, and the separate no-action position on posting customer digital assets as margin.
• Kraken — announcement of CFTC-regulated US perpetual futures: the mid-June 2026 access date, the eligibility wording, the listing venue and the product mechanics.
• OKX — US risk and compliance disclosures: the spot and over-the-counter product set for the US platform, and the money transmitter registrations.
• OKX — US licences page, updated 8 August 2026: the six enumerated excluded jurisdictions that disagree with the global disclosure's treatment of US territories.
• FCA Handbook — COBS 3.5, elective professional clients: the qualitative assessment, the three quantitative criteria, and the written warning and confirmation requirements.
• FCA Handbook — COBS 22.6, the retail cryptoasset restrictions: the prohibition as amended, covering both derivatives and notes not listed on a UK Recognised Investment Exchange.
• FCA — policy statement PS20/10, October 2020: the express carve-out for professional clients, and the supervisory focus on opt-ups and offshoring.
• FCA — consultation paper CP25/36 on client categorisation: the proposal to delete the quantitative test, the alternative wealth route, and the absence of any published date for final rules.
• FCA — the new cryptoasset regime and its authorisation gateway: final rules published 30 June 2026, and the expected application window from 30 September 2026 to 28 February 2027.
• UK statutory instrument 2026 No. 102: made on 4 February 2026, with commencement of the substantive provisions deferred to 25 October 2027.
• EUR-Lex — Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets: the Article 2(4)(a) exclusion of financial instruments, the Article 61 reverse-solicitation provision, and the Article 143(3) transitional sunset.
• EUR-Lex — Directive 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments: the Article 39 national branch option for third-country firms, and the Article 42 exclusive-initiative exemption.
• ESMA — public statement of 24 February 2026 on derivatives in scope of the product intervention measures (ESMA35-243228190-8024): the likelihood wording, the national attribution of the live measures, and the irrelevance of a product's commercial name.
• ESMA — register of authorised crypto-asset service providers: the authorised service lists relied on for both European venue findings, and the full-register search behind the Binance negative.
• OKX — European contract specifications: the five-year term and 2031 settlement dates, the entity through which the contracts are offered, and the stated leverage ceiling.
• Bybit — terms of service, updated 23 January 2026: the excluded-jurisdictions clause naming France, and the absence of any European Economic Area wording in the document.
• Bybit — notice for users in the European Economic Area, 29 June 2026: the progressive limitation of services in the region, and the Malta passport exception.
• Bybit — service restricted countries, updated 6 August 2026: the flat excluded-jurisdictions list, and the basis for the finding that no product-level distinction is published.
• OKX — global risk and compliance disclosure, updated 8 July 2026: the four derivatives-related country restrictions with their broader scope, the reservation-of-right wording, and the restricted-locations list.
• Monetary Authority of Singapore — Investor Alert List: the register's own definition, the two June 2026 entries, and the statement that the list is not exhaustive.
• Monetary Authority of Singapore — media release on misconceptions about the alert list: the warning that absence from the list is not a safety signal, and the reason one exchange was added.
• Securities and Futures Commission — policy statement of 11 February 2026: the invitation to platform operators to submit structures, the professional-investor limitation, and the statutory definition it points to.
• ASIC — information sheet 225 on crypto-assets: the treatment of perpetual futures as derivatives, alongside the separate product intervention order capping retail crypto contract-for-difference leverage.
• Dubai VARA — exchange services rulebook, perpetual and margin provisions: the definition of a perpetual exchange-traded derivative, the retail leverage cap, and the initial margin requirement behind it.
• Singapore Statutes Online — Securities and Futures Act 2001, section 4A: the three alternative limbs of the accredited investor test for an individual.

Frequently asked questions

Can a US person trade perpetual futures legally?

Onshore, and only on venues the CFTC has designated, this became possible during June 2026. The Commission published a policy statement on the listing of perpetual contracts on 29 May 2026 and approved a bitcoin perpetual futures contract for a designated contract market the same day; the first contract went live on 3 June 2026 and a second route was announced around 15 June 2026. Two qualifications belong in the same breath. Eligibility is still screened by each venue, so approval of a contract is not permission for every resident. And the framework is under challenge: Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. v. CFTC, No. 1:26-cv-02157, filed in the District of Columbia on 18 June 2026, asks the court to vacate both the order and the policy statement. No stay was found and trading continued as at 13 August 2026.

Can a UK resident trade crypto perpetual futures?

UK retail clients cannot buy crypto derivatives from any firm acting in, or from, the UK, and that prohibition has been in the FCA Handbook since 6 January 2021. The ban turns on client categorisation rather than residence: the FCA declined to extend it to professional clients, and an elective professional client therefore falls outside it. The scope is nonetheless territorial as to the firm, because the rule binds firms acting in or from the UK rather than binding travellers. Qualifying as an elective professional client requires two of three criteria plus a firm-level assessment, and the criteria themselves may not survive the year, since the FCA has consulted on deleting the quantitative test outright and has published no date for final rules.

Does a MiCA licence let an exchange offer perpetuals?

No, and the regulation says so in its own scope article. MiCA does not apply to crypto-assets that qualify as MiFID II financial instruments, which is Article 2(4)(a), so a crypto-asset service provider authorisation is the wrong permission for a derivative. Offering these contracts to clients in the European Union is an investment service and requires MiFID II investment-firm authorisation instead. This matters commercially as well as legally: a register entry showing that a group holds a MiCA authorisation tells a reader nothing about whether that group may offer derivatives, and reading it the other way is the single most common inversion in this area.

Is the regulated EU route actually a perpetual contract?

It is not. In the European Economic Area, OKX lists five-year expiry futures, branded X-Perps, and the venue's own contract specifications give every listed contract a term of five years with settlement dates in 2031. OKX's own explainer calls them five-year expiry crypto futures that use a funding rate mechanism. The regulatory definition a reader is likely to have in mind describes a contract with no fixed expiration date that relies on a periodic funding rate; the EU instrument keeps the funding mechanism and adds the expiry. The brand name contains the word perps and is the least reliable part of the description, so the qualifier belongs in the noun rather than in a footnote.

Does the MAS Investor Alert List mean an exchange is banned?

The list is a warning register rather than an enforcement action or a ban. MAS describes it as naming entities that may be, or may have been, wrongly perceived as licensed or regulated by MAS, and states that the list is not exhaustive and reflects what was known to MAS. Two things follow. Absence proves nothing, and MAS says as much in its own media release, warning that unlisted offshore entities are not thereby safe to deal with. And placement is not neutral either: the same release records one exchange being listed because it had solicited Singapore users without a licence. Read an entry as a warning surface with a date on it, not as a court finding.

Does trading on a DEX avoid jurisdictional exposure?

Not on the evidence of the clearest natural experiment available. MAS added a centralised exchange to its Investor Alert List on 17 June 2026 and an on-chain perpetuals venue on 26 June 2026, nine days apart and with entirely different custody models. The second entry names the foundation website and the trading frontend rather than the chain, which sharpens the point rather than softening it: what a regulator reaches is the access surface, and an on-chain venue has one as surely as a centralised venue does. Jurisdictional exposure therefore attaches to how a venue is reached rather than to how it is built, and a reader who changes architecture to change legal status has changed the wrong variable.

Does the UK now regulate crypto exchanges under the new regime?

Not yet, and a page written in the present tense about it is wrong by more than a year. The statutory instrument was made on 4 February 2026, but its own commencement provision states that the regulations come into force on 25 October 2027. The FCA published final rules and guidance on 30 June 2026, and the authorisation gateway is expected to open on 30 September 2026 and to close on 28 February 2027. That closing date has to travel with the opening date, or a reader takes the window as open-ended. Until commencement, the live UK constraint on this page's subject remains the retail derivatives prohibition rather than the new regime.

Related resources

• DeFi derivatives: the complete guide — the cluster hub: what a perpetual contract is, how it differs from a dated future, and why an expiry date is the classification question regulators keep returning to.
• Perpetual funding rates explained — the periodic funding mechanism that the CFTC definition quoted above turns on, worked through venue by venue.
• Perps DEX vs CeFi: market structure — the architectural comparison behind the finding that custody model does not predict regulatory exposure.
• Bybit vs OKX comparison — the venue-level detail this page deliberately leaves out: fee tiers, funding intervals, margin modes and insurance-fund specifics side by side.

Financial Disclaimer

This content is not financial advice. All information provided is for educational purposes only. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant investment risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.