Ondo Perps CEO David Wells has identified the United States as a significant opportunity for perpetual futures trading, but he stopped short of confirming any plan to bring the platform to the US market. His comments arrive as the offshore platform, operated through Ondo Global Panama Inc., surpassed $8 billion in cumulative trading volume by mid-August.

The platform has moved through a deliberately staged rollout. Ondo Perps began early access in March, opened a public beta in June, and rolled out its full feature set in July. That adoption curve — $8 billion in cumulative volume within roughly five months of early access — reflects demand from its non-US user base for around-the-clock leveraged exposure to traditional assets.

Ondo Perps offers 24/7 leveraged trading on US equities, ETFs, indices, and commodities, with leverage of up to 20x. Traders can post tokenized securities and stablecoins as collateral, a design choice that ties the derivatives venue directly into Ondo Finance's broader tokenization infrastructure.

The regulatory groundwork

While Wells declined to confirm a US launch, the company has already laid the procedural groundwork. In August, Ondo Finance and Oasis Pro sent formal letters to both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission arguing that cash-settled perpetual futures can fit within the existing US regulatory framework without new legislation.

Their argument rests on interpretation rather than statute: current securities law can accommodate these instruments, the companies contend, if regulators are willing to read the existing framework that way. The dual petition to the SEC and CFTC acknowledges the jurisdictional ambiguity that has long shadowed perpetuals in the US, where crypto-linked derivatives historically fall to the CFTC while security-based instruments sit with the SEC.

The compliance firewall remains firm. The platform is explicitly off-limits to US persons and to users in certain other jurisdictions, a restriction Ondo has maintained since launch. That barrier is unlikely to come down without explicit regulatory blessing — a point the petitions to both agencies implicitly concede.

Spot expansion

Ondo Perps widened its footprint on September 28 with the launch of spot trading for 12 tokenized stocks and ETFs, including NVDAon, TSLAon, and SPYon. The platform waived trading fees for the first 30 days to encourage buy-and-hedge strategies among early adopters. The move connects the spot and derivatives sides of the venue: users can hold tokenized equities directly and use them as margin for leveraged positions on the same platform.

The structural advantage

For Ondo Finance, the perps platform extends an existing business rather than starting one from scratch. The company's infrastructure for tokenized securities gives Ondo Perps a collateral layer that competitors would need to build independently. Traders pledging tokenized assets as margin creates a capital-efficient loop between spot holdings and leveraged exposure — an operational integration that distinguishes the venue from standalone derivatives protocols that rely on stablecoin-only collateral models.

The US question now hinges on the regulators, not on Ondo's engineering. If the SEC and CFTC accept the interpretation laid out in the August petitions, cash-settled perpetuals could reach US users under existing law; if they don't, the offshore firewall stays up and the $8 billion platform remains a non-US product.

The industry will be watching both agencies' responses to the Ondo-Oasis Pro petitions closely in the coming months, as any written guidance on cash-settled perpetuals would set a precedent for every offshore venue currently excluding US users.