CFTC leverage ruling finally opens the door for $25 trillion giants to enter the crypto market

On Dec. 4, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approved leveraged spot crypto trading on federally regulated exchanges.

For the first time in American history, spot Bitcoin and other crypto assets can trade with margin inside the CFTC framework that already governs futures and options, backed by central clearing and long-tested risk management.

Acting Chairman Caroline Pham called it a “historic milestone” that finally gives Americans “safe US markets now, not offshore exchanges that lack basic safeguards against uncontrolled customer losses.”

The move does not kill the offshore venues that dominated the last cycle. Instead, it sets up something more structural: a lasting split between two parallel Bitcoin markets serving different users and risk appetites.

The great bifurcation begins

For 15 years, US law has required leveraged retail commodity transactions to occur on regulated exchanges. In practice, that requirement never applied to crypto because no such exchanges existed for leveraged spot.

As Pham put it, Congress passed reforms after the financial crisis, but “the CFTC never implemented this critical customer protection reform by providing regulatory clarity on how to list these retail exchange-traded products despite years of market demand.”

The result was a long period of regulatory exile. The entire market for margin-based spot trading migrated offshore into jurisdictions such as the Seychelles, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands.

Platforms there offered high leverage and minimal oversight, becoming the engine of Bitcoin’s price discovery. However, when Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapsed, that model’s vulnerabilities were exposed in full.

Yesterday’s move ends that exile, but not by bringing everything home. Instead, it formalizes a divide.

One market will remain offshore, high-leverage and high-risk, serving the so-called “degen” retail trader who wants minimal friction. The other will develop onshore, with lower leverage, central clearing, and portfolio margining for banks, hedge funds, and sophisticated proprietary traders.

Pham clearly described the broader policy goal. She stated that with President Trump’s plan for digital assets, the CFTC will “reclaim [America’s] place as the world leader in digital asset markets.”

In this structure, the CFTC has not simply approved another product. It has begun to retrofit the plumbing of the US financial system to accommodate Bitcoin.

The new instruments rely on the Commodity Exchange Act’s “Actual Delivery” provisions to create something that behaves like a physically settled future but trades like a spot contract.

Functionally, this is the first step toward treating Bitcoin like regulated markets treat foreign exchange pairs, where spot, forwards, and swaps coexist within a unified risk and clearing framework.

Icebreakers, tankers, and the basis trade

Bitnomial is the first exchange to secure this specific approval, and its launch will carry symbolic weight.

However, as crypto analyst Shanaka Anslem noted, in market plumbing, the first mover is often just “one venue” in a much larger structural shift.

He described Bitnomial as the place where “leveraged spot, perpetuals, futures, options, [and] portfolio margining” come together under full federal oversight, and he argued that the “structural implications are staggering.”

The technical mechanism matters. By allowing these spot products to be cleared through a central counterparty clearinghouse, the CFTC has enabled portfolio margining for Bitcoin.

Under the old regime, a trader long-spotting Bitcoin at a US exchange and shorting a Bitcoin future at CME had to post full collateral at both venues. Under the new model, the clearinghouse can view those legs as a single hedged portfolio, thereby reducing required capital.

Considering this, Anslem estimates that cross-margining between spot and derivatives could reduce capital requirements by 30-50%.

Moreover, Bitnomial is only the icebreaker rather than the end state of this pivotal regulatory move. The channel it opens is wide enough for larger “tankers” such as CME Group, ICE, and other established derivatives venues like Coinbase Derivatives, which already clear enormous volumes across rates, commodities, and FX.

If those platforms adopt similar products, Bitcoin can be cross-margined against deep pools of traditional risk, further integrating it into the core of US financial infrastructure.

That is also why traditional finance voices are paying attention.

Nate Geraci, president of Nova Dius Wealth, argued that the new regime “basically paves the way for every major brokerage to offer spot crypto trading and feel comfortable from a regulatory perspective.”

This essentially opens the market to major traditional financial institutions such as Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity, which collectively manage more than $25 trillion in assets.

The retail fallacy

Meanwhile, a popular narrative is that this CFTC approval will immediately drag most liquidity back to US venues.

However, that expectation misreads who trades where. Offshore exchanges such as Binance and Bybit built their empires by offering extreme leverage, fast onboarding, and limited scrutiny.

CFTC-regulated venues will look very different. Bound by conservative clearinghouse standards, they are likely to cap leverage in the mid single digits, similar to major FX pairs. The platforms will also require complete know-your-customer checks, report positions to US authorities, and enforce robust margin and liquidation rules.

So, the trader trying to turn a small balance into a life-changing gain with 100x leverage is unlikely to shift into that environment. That segment of the market will remain offshore and will continue to drive sharp intraday swings.

However, what moves onshore is the basis trade and other institutional strategies that rely on stable plumbing more than on extreme gearing.

For years, hedge funds ran long spot and short futures positions with one leg in Chicago and one in the Caribbean, accepting substantial counterparty risk in exchange for higher yield.

Anslem argued that “Americans were forced offshore” and that “billions vanished” when that risk crystallized. Under the new structure, much of that activity can migrate inside the US regulatory perimeter, trading off maximum leverage for capital protection and legal certainty.

For large allocators, that trade-off is acceptable.

As Bitcoin analyst Adam Livingston put it, the CFTC’s move is “the first time in American history that spot crypto markets will operate inside a fully federal regulatory framework.”

In his view, that regulatory green light shifts Bitcoin from “interesting” to “allocatable” for pensions, insurers, asset managers, and banks, even if actual allocation will depend on internal risk policies and custody solutions.

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