Yesterday we covered crypto's forbidden fruit: perpetual futures. 

Recap: Perps are bets on price, with leverage, and no expiration date. And they've become insanely popular. As in: $60 trillion in volume per year. 

But there’s a reason maybe you’ve never heard of them: Americans were locked out. 

But that’s coming to an end. 

The CFTC blessed them in May and Chicago's big exchange, the CME, is suing to stop it. 

So the question today is twofold: Does it matter enough to boost any stocks? And, if it does, who’s going to win the lion’s share? 

I have ideas. 

Why this fight matters

Crypto perps alone are worth a few billion a year to whoever sells them. For Robinhood, that’s worth maybe a fifth of the stock. Real money. Not life-changing.

BUT… 

Stock perps are a different animal. 

The day an S&P 500 perp starts pulling from the 60 million options contracts Americans trade every day, this stops being a crypto story and becomes the biggest retail leverage market in the galaxy. 

That's the version the CME is going nuts over. 

That’s the version Coinbase and Robinhood want to dominate. 

THAT’S the version you want to pay attention to. 

Coinbase: the kitchen

On paper, Coinbase already won.

It spent two years building everything. A licensed futures exchange. A licensed broker to feed it. Deribit, the biggest crypto options venue on earth, bought for a few billion. 

And no less… it's been selling perps to Americans since last summer: bitcoin and ether first, then an S&P 500 perp at 20x this month.

And yet, read the quarter. Revenue down 19%. A $359 million loss, the third in a row. Monthly users down a million. Assets on the platform down 42%.

Coinbase built the best kitchen in the business and the dining room is emptying out. 

Its smart move was to cook for other restaurants: a stablecoin that earns interest, a derivatives exchange that Interactive Brokers resells, rails that Hyperliquid runs on. 

Half its revenue now comes from that, and it's the half that held up. Great kitchen. Fewer diners.