A joint comment letter filed Wednesday pushes the commodities regulator to extend its new crypto perpetuals framework to crude oil, citing a $500 billion offshore market and weekend price discovery during the Iran strikes.

The Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and TradeXYZ submitted a formal comment letter to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission on August 26, urging the agency to create a regulated pathway for energy perpetual contracts, with crude oil as the primary target. The letter asks the CFTC to adopt a technology-neutral, principles-based framework and to clarify what constitutes a "business day" for instruments that trade continuously, around the clock, every day of the week. The submission responds to the CFTC's June 22 request for public comment on 24/7 energy trading and on-chain perpetual contracts referencing physical commodities. The official comment period for that request closed on July 27, 2026, nearly a month before this letter was filed. The procedural standing of the submission before the commission has not been publicly confirmed.

Perpetual contracts are derivatives without an expiration date. They track the price of an underlying asset through a funding rate mechanism, and they have become the dominant instrument on decentralised trading platforms, which together now account for roughly 16.5% of total global perpetuals volume. Hyperliquid alone holds approximately 60 to 70% of on-chain perpetuals activity. The platform currently geo-blocks US users entirely.

The letter is the second in two days from HPC, a crypto policy organization founded in February 2026 and led by attorney and CEO Jake Chervinsky. The organization was seeded with 1 million HYPE tokens at launch. Two days earlier, on August 24, the HPC separately asked the SEC and CFTC to harmonize rules across all perpetual contracts, arguing that classification should be based on a contract's economic structure and trading characteristics rather than what the underlying asset happens to be. That broader letter covers equity perpetuals as well, including contracts on individual stocks and indices.

TradeXYZ, the startup behind trade.xyz, is a roughly dozen-person team that operates on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 protocol, a permissionless system for creating perpetual markets on any asset. TradeXYZ accounts for approximately 99% of all activity on those markets. The firm has processed over $500 billion in cumulative trading volume since launching in late 2025, with July 2026 volume alone reaching $107 billion. Open interest across HIP-3 markets sits near $4 billion, including roughly $450 million on a perpetual contract tracking the S&P 500.

The core empirical argument in the letter is straightforward: when US and Israeli forces conducted missile strikes on Iran earlier this year, triggering an oil supply shock over a weekend, Hyperliquid's crude oil perpetuals kept trading while CME and NYMEX were closed. By the time conventional futures markets reopened Monday, prices on-chain had already adjusted. Data cited in the HPC letter and in an August 2026 Oxford Institute for Energy Studies analysis found that in roughly 75% of weekend closures, crude oil prices ended closer to Sunday's opening level than to Friday's close, indicating that relevant price information accumulates when regulated markets are dark.

Vanderbilt Law professor Yesha Yadav put the regulatory stakes plainly: American regulators "must face up to the potential for liquidity to migrate and for price discovery to occur offshore." CFTC Chair Michael Selig has signaled some receptivity. In May 2026, when the commission approved the first bitcoin perpetual futures contract for a registered US exchange, a submission by prediction-markets platform Kalshi, and issued guidance for future submissions, Selig said the goal was to bring perpetual trading within US oversight "rather than pushing those risks offshore." President Donald Trump has also publicly stated that Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the US market in a compliant manner, adding political visibility to the push. Even so, CME Group filed suit against the CFTC in June 2026 over guidance that could open the door for crypto-native platforms, a sign that the established futures industry is not welcoming the competition.

The US is notably behind on access. Africa's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, South Africa-based VALR, integrated Hyperliquid in July 2026, listing over 200 perpetual markets including crude oil, gold, forex, and equity contracts. South African, Nigerian, and Kenyan users have been able to trade Hyperliquid oil perpetuals for roughly seven weeks through a regulated, FSCA-supervised venue. In April 2026, VALR also connected with payments network Onafriq to accept mobile money deposits in Kenyan shillings, Ugandan shillings, Zambian kwacha, Central African CFA francs, and Congolese francs, with automatic conversion to stablecoins. That means retail traders in Nairobi or Lagos can in principle fund a crude oil hedge using a mobile wallet, while a refinery manager in Houston cannot access the same instrument through any legal US channel.

For energy-importing nations across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the stakes extend beyond finance. Nigeria, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea produce significant volumes of crude; Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka import it and absorb price shocks in currencies that carry little buffer. A CFTC-sanctioned, 24/7 oil perpetuals market, collateralized in stablecoins and accessible via blockchain infrastructure, would give smaller market participants a hedging tool that currently, given CME's minimum contract sizes and intermediary requirements, effectively limits comparable access to institutional-scale participants.

The CFTC has not indicated a timeline for acting on its June RFC. The Congressional alternative, the CLARITY Act, does not cover perpetual futures and remains stalled in the Senate. That leaves the commission's own rulemaking as the only near-term path for bringing this market onshore, and the HPC is treating it as such.