CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange have launched a lobbying effort in Washington. Specifically, the two companies, which also own the New York Stock Exchange, want the decentralised derivatives platform Hyperliquid placed under US oversight.
According to a Bloomberg report, they held talks with officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as well as with members of Congress. They are calling for mandatory registration covering customer identification (KYC), trade surveillance and full market oversight. At the centre of the accusations sits the business in oil perpetuals. In April 2026, daily turnover in this segment on Hyperliquid averaged more than 700 million USD. Before the Ukraine-Russia conflict began, volumes still moved in the single-digit million range per day. As a result, CME and ICE argue that activity at this scale could influence global oil benchmarks. In addition, they point to two further risks: circumvention of US sanctions through pseudonymous trading, and insider trading without any oversight body.
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Market share as the driver of escalation
According to April 2026 data, Hyperliquid controls roughly 70 percent of on-chain perpetual futures volume. In the decentralised derivatives sector, its fee share stood at 53 percent in May, while open interest recently hit an all-time high of 2.45 billion USD. Between August 2025 and January 2026, the platform processed cumulative trading volume of 1.59 trillion USD. Hyperliquid is therefore the first decentralised exchange to rank among the ten largest perpetual marketplaces worldwide.
The DEX share of the global perpetual futures market has risen from 2.0 to 10.2 percent. Furthermore, every tenth dollar in crypto perpetual trading now flows through decentralised infrastructure. To handle this load, Hyperliquid operates its own Layer 1 blockchain, which according to the company processes more than 200,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality. The platform officially excludes US users. However, that has not defused the regulatory argument from the traditional exchanges.
While Hyperliquid is heading for annual profit of more than 1 billion USD, ICE and CME together generated more than 5 billion USD last year. In Cerebras pre-market contracts, Hyperliquid recently recorded daily volume of 230 million USD. By comparison, the Nasdaq pre-market stood at around 30 million USD.
Conflict of interest in the background
The move by the two companies comes at a time when both are themselves bringing crypto derivatives products to market. CME plans to launch Bitcoin Volatility Futures on 1 June. The Nasdaq CME Crypto Index Futures follow on 8 June. The established providers are thus entering the very segment that Hyperliquid dominates. Critics therefore read the lobbying initiative as an attempt to push back an uncomfortable competitor through regulation.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig publicly took up the initiative. He stated that on-chain trading activity at this scale could influence the spot or futures price on regulated platforms. ICE manager Trabue Bland, Senior Vice President for Futures, sees the integrity of benchmarks at risk when a market of this size operates entirely outside any supervision.
Hyperliquid rejected the accusations as unfounded. Spokesperson George Godsal pointed out that every trade, every liquidation and every funding payment is publicly verifiable. No traditional exchange can deliver this level of transparency. Nevertheless, the HYPE token reacted sharply to the Bloomberg report and fell by around 6 percent, from above 45 USD to below 43 USD. Earlier in the same week, the token had gained 20 percent after Coinbase and Circle announced partnerships.
Hyperliquid builds its own lobbying infrastructure in Washington
On 18 February 2026, Hyperliquid had already founded the Hyperliquid Policy Center in Washington D.C. It is led by Jake Chervinsky, a well-known attorney in the crypto industry. Funding came in the form of 1 million HYPE tokens, worth around 29 million USD at the time of the announcement. On 30 April, the centre filed an extensive comment letter with the CFTC as part of the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on prediction markets. In doing so, Hyperliquid positions itself early as an interlocutor for DeFi derivatives regulation, not merely as a target of supervisory measures.
At the same time, the company is reorganising its operational setup. After seven months of operation, the platform is discontinuing its in-house stablecoin USDH, launched in September 2025. USDC serves as the successor, with Coinbase as treasury partner. Moreover, the alignment with a US-regulated stablecoin and a US-listed partner strengthens the case against blanket accusations of sanctions evasion.
In regulatory terms, the conflict falls into an open phase. The US Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which Congress is debating in 2026, is intended to reorder responsibilities between the SEC and the CFTC. However, the draft does not yet address DeFi derivatives conclusively. Until then, the question remains open as to which criteria would actually bring an on-chain perpetual platform under CFTC oversight. The next regulatory milestones will be set by the CME product launches on 1 and 8 June.
