On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, the Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) said in a post that the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should bring compute perpetual contracts into the United States. HPC describes itself as an independent research and advocacy organization focused on a regulated path for Americans to access onchain markets, including onchain derivatives venues. Its argument starts with the buyers of compute: "When prices rise, the developers that rent compute carry the same risk with no widely available hedging tools," the group wrote, adding that "pricing in the compute market remains fragmented and largely private."

The post accompanied a formal comment letter, dated October 20, 2026 and addressed to CFTC Secretary Christopher Kirkpatrick. The letter responds to the Commission's Request for Comment on the Listing of Compute Derivatives Contracts (RIN 3038-AF77), published at 91 Fed. Reg. 54,259 on August 21, 2026. That distinction matters: this is a comment submission responding to a request whose published deadline was October 20, not an approval, a rule, or a product launch. The request for comment and HPC's submission do not approve any compute perpetual contract.

Why It Matters

Compute has a property most commodities do not. A GPU-hour exists only in the hour it is used; it cannot be stored, inventoried, or delivered later. Compute is produced and consumed continuously, and developers train and query models around the clock. The scale is no longer small: private investment in AI data centers, compute hardware, and networking equipment reached roughly 0.8 percent of US GDP in the first quarter of 2026, according to the letter, citing Epoch AI. A data center earns rental revenue hour by hour, and an inference platform incurs compute costs on each model call — exposures with no fixed end date.

That is where the perpetual structure fits the letter's argument. A perpetual futures contract has no expiration; funding payments exchanged periodically between longs and shorts help encourage alignment with the reference price. Hedging a continuous exposure with dated futures requires a strip of contracts and repeated rolls, each adding transaction costs and timing risk, while a hedger can maintain one position without scheduled rolls, subject to margin requirements, funding costs, and basis risk. The letter lists the resulting advantages: liquidity concentrates in a single instrument instead of fragmenting across contract months, there is no roll friction, and continuous trading, where offered, can improve access when price-moving events occur. The regulatory backdrop is recent: the CFTC approved a bitcoin perpetual futures contract submitted by a registered US exchange on May 29, 2026. Separately, also on May 29, 2026, CFTC staff issued an interpretation and conditional no-action position concerning a registered futures commission merchant's access to foreign derivatives. The letter notes that perpetual-style contracts referencing digital assets have traded on a registered US exchange since July 2025.

The letter identifies benchmark design as a central challenge, and pairs it with safeguards for contract design. A derivatives contract settles to a single reference price, so the benchmark choice determines which chips and regions count as interchangeable. Compute benchmarks are developing before the cash market has standardized — the letter compares the situation to Henry Hub natural gas and describes it as an inversion of the usual order. One reference point already exists in the market: event contracts on GPU rental prices have been listed. For safeguards, the letter proposes that compute perpetuals proceed through case-by-case review under Regulation 40.3 and the Commission's 2026 policy statement on perpetual contracts, with funding computed from a continuously updated, multi-contributor index over a time-weighted window, funding-rate caps or smoothing over a longer window, and leverage limits, position limits, and open-interest caps. The submissions may inform the Commission's next steps, including its approach to compute benchmarks and contract listings.

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LeverUp's perpetual markets are built on a protocol-managed virtual liquidity architecture.