According to Cointelegraph, tokenization firm Ondo is pressing the SEC and CFTC to let perpetual futures on individual US stocks trade onshore, arguing that existing securities law already has room for the product. The pitch is framed as a regulatory-onshoring move: rather than leaving this kind of trading to offshore venues, bring it under domestic oversight. The summary gives no detail on mechanics, timeline, or which agency Ondo thinks should take the lead.
Why this matters for people using cash machines
It is tempting to treat this as a story about institutional plumbing that has nothing to do with someone feeding twenty-dollar bills into a Bitcoin ATM at a gas station. But the two ends of the crypto market are connected by regulatory attention, and attention is a scarce resource. When the SEC and CFTC are being lobbied to design new frameworks for equity-linked perpetuals, that is staff time and political capital not being spent on the far less glamorous problem of how retail cash-to-crypto access actually works on the ground. There is no equivalent trade group knocking on regulators’ doors asking why a machine buying Bitcoin can charge a median fee of 16 percent, per the Kansas City Fed’s 2023 survey, with spreads and exchange-rate costs pushing all-in totals to 20 percent or more. Nobody is asking the SEC to bless a standardized disclosure for that. Sophisticated capital gets policy attention because it has lobbyists; unsophisticated cash users get whatever leftover oversight the state money-transmitter regime happens to provide.
Our view
Onshoring perpetual futures on stocks is, on its own terms, a defensible ask, and treating existing securities law as flexible enough to house new derivative structures is a reasonable argument for Ondo to make. But the framing in the coverage, that this is about protecting US market integrity by pulling offshore activity back onshore, deserves a skeptical eyebrow when the same regulators have shown far less urgency about the cash layer of crypto that touches the most financially exposed users. A retail Bitcoin ATM customer has no chargeback route once a transaction confirms, is often paying fees that the Fed itself says are probably undercounted because high-fee operators tend to stop self-reporting, and is transacting through a money-services business whose licensing depends on which state they happen to stand in. That is a bigger real-world protection gap than whether a stock perpetual clears through a CFTC-registered venue or a Cayman-based one. We are not against bringing derivatives activity home. We are against a regulatory conversation that treats “onshoring” as inherently virtuous while the domestic cash-crypto retail market, which is already onshore, already licensed, and already known to charge fees that would draw outrage in almost any other consumer financial context, gets comparatively little scrutiny. If the SEC and CFTC have bandwidth to design new equity-derivative frameworks, they have bandwidth to ask why one in five machine listings we checked during our directory build-out no longer existed, or why a Chapter 11 filing could take more than 9,000 machines offline with limited notice to the people who used them.
What to watch
Watch whether the SEC or CFTC issues any public response, even informal, to Ondo’s proposal, and whether that response comes faster than any equivalent movement on ATM-level consumer protection has in recent years. Watch which agency Ondo and similar firms ultimately court, since a CFTC-led framework and an SEC-led one imply very different disclosure and margin regimes for stock perpetuals. And on our own beat, watch whether the fee transparency conversation gets any oxygen at all while this higher-profile derivatives debate runs. If state regulators or federal banking agencies use this moment to revisit money-transmitter obligations for kiosk operators, that would be the signal that cash-layer users are finally getting proportionate attention. Absent that, this is another example of crypto policy bandwidth flowing toward the products favored by well-capitalized players while the machine on the street corner keeps operating under the same patchwork rules it always has.
