Payward Plans Hyperliquid Perpetuals for U.S. Clients After Global Trading Exceeds $85 Trillion
Key Facts
Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said on September 16, 2026, that it plans to launch onchain perpetual futures markets for U.S. clients, starting with HIP-3 markets on Hyperliquid. The project remains a plan subject to regulatory approval, and the company has not set a date for trading to begin. Under the announcement, the contracts will be listed under Bitnomial Exchange rules. The plan puts Hyperliquid’s public order book at the center of trade execution and recording. Regulatory and operational responsibilities will remain with Payward subsidiaries, separating the onchain trading infrastructure from the entities that manage the market and customer accounts.
Under Payward’s plan, Bitnomial will create, own and operate the proposed market, and will also clear and settle the contracts. NinjaTrader Clearing will hold customer accounts as a futures commission merchant registered with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Trading will not be available to all Hyperliquid users; the plan requires accounts to complete onboarding with NinjaTrader and be added to both companies’ allowlists. This arrangement makes market access dependent on a brokerage gateway and specific compliance procedures, even though the order book operates on a public network. Payward has not announced when trading will begin or whether the required approvals have been secured.
Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the company already offers U.S. perpetuals and intends to launch them on Hyperliquid as well. He added that the company is acting in a way that puts "customers first," as he put it. Hyperliquid says it serves as a neutral infrastructure layer, while market deployers retain control and responsibility for their markets. The Block reported that the allowlisting feature is available on the testnet and that the planned launch remains subject to regulatory approval. The announcement therefore concerns a proposed market design, not a new product currently available to users.
The HIP-3 framework, which Hyperliquid launched in November 2025, according to an annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, allows third-party operators to create perpetual futures markets on the network’s order book by staking HYPE tokens as collateral. The same report said HIP-3 markets accounted for about 48.0% of total Hyperliquid trading in the 30 days ended August 23, 2026, and their cumulative volume had exceeded $514 billion since the framework launched. On the same date, Hyperliquid accounted for 40.1% of global onchain perpetual futures trading volume over 24 hours and 62.5% of open interest in those contracts. Cumulative perpetual futures trading volume on the platform had exceeded $5.4 trillion since its founding. Payward had said that Hyperliquid had been operating since 2023 and that trading volume on it exceeded $200 billion in the 30 days before the company’s September announcement.
The plan comes amid a global perpetual futures market that Payward said has operated outside the United States since 2016. Citing CoinGecko’s 2026 report, the company said global trading in these contracts exceeded $85 trillion in 2025. In the United States, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on May 29, 2026, approved the listing of a perpetual contract linked to the spot price of Bitcoin as a futures contract on a designated contract market. But the commission said perpetual contracts linked to asset classes not covered by the approval order require case-by-case review under Regulation 40.3. It also said the design of these contracts may not suit all asset classes, and invited participants to submit products tied to other assets for review and approval through the same voluntary process. This makes regulatory approval a central condition for any expansion beyond the products covered by the earlier approval.
HYPE closed at $78.41 on October 26 and then at $79.02 on October 27, according to EL7 data. These readings came after Payward announced its plans in September, but do not change the fact that the proposed market launch is subject to regulatory approval. The announcement did not include a specific launch date, while coverage indicated that the allowlisting feature is available on the testnet. The next regulatory step is to obtain the necessary approvals before listing the contracts under Bitnomial Exchange rules. Payward did not provide a timetable for completing those procedures or beginning trading.