A treasurer holding a bitcoin futures position and a treasurer holding a bitcoin perpetual swap are exposed to two structurally different things, even when the price risk looks identical on a screen. One trade sits behind a central counterparty (CCP) that has become the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer, backed by a guaranty fund and the clearing house's own capital. The other sits behind a venue's own insurance fund and an auto-deleveraging queue. US regulators are still deciding how far the first model should reach into crypto, who should be allowed to run it, and whether retail clients should clear directly with it at all. This piece describes the structures; it is not legal or investment advice.
Two different things called clearing
In a CCP model, the clearing house steps into every trade through novation. If a clearing member defaults, losses are absorbed in a defined order known as the default waterfall. In a venue-internal model there is no novation to a separate clearing house: the exchange's insurance fund absorbs losses from liquidations that could not be closed at a fair price, and if that fund runs out, losses are pushed onto profitable counterparties through auto-deleveraging. How that second model works is covered in our explainer on perpetual futures and funding rates and is not repeated here. The distinction matters for counterparty risk, for capital treatment and, as the sections below show, for what a regulator will let a given venue offer.
Which central counterparties clear crypto, and since when
CME Group announced on 1 December 2017 that it had self-certified bitcoin futures for launch on 18 December 2017, cash-settled against the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, available for clearing through CME ClearPort, with initial margin of 35%. By September 2026 its crypto futures covered bitcoin, ether, XRP, Solana, Cardano, Chainlink, Stellar, Avalanche and Sui, and on 22 September 2026 it announced Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures for 19 October 2026, pending regulatory review.
Eurex, the Deutsche Börse derivatives exchange, runs a separate European track centrally cleared by Eurex Clearing: FTSE Bitcoin Index futures from April 2023, options on those futures from October 2023, FTSE Ethereum Index futures and options from 12 August 2024, and, from 5 May 2025, nano-sized bitcoin and ether index futures in US dollars alongside options on an iShares Bitcoin ETP.
Coinbase Derivatives, a CFTC-regulated designated contract market, clears through Nodal Clear, a CFTC-regulated clearing house in Deutsche Börse's EEX Group. In June 2025 the two announced a plan, subject to CFTC approval and targeted for 2026, to accept USDC as margin collateral for those futures, with Coinbase Custody Trust holding it.
Bitnomial is the outlier. On 13 December 2023 the CFTC voted to register Bitnomial Clearinghouse as a derivatives clearing organisation (DCO), completing a group that already held an exchange licence and a futures commission merchant (FCM) licence. The dissenting statement described it as the Commission's first vote to approve a vertically integrated market structure. In April 2025 Bitnomial self-certified what it called the first perpetual futures contracts listed on a US exchange, with trading from 28 April 2025. On 1 May 2026 Payward, the parent of Kraken, completed its acquisition of Bitnomial, so that full exchange, clearing and brokerage stack now sits inside a large crypto trading group.
The instructive counter-example is LedgerX. It began business on 16 October 2017, according to its later owner's filings the first federally regulated exchange and clearing house to list and clear fully collateralised, physically settled bitcoin swaps and options. It passed through FTX ownership, and Miami International Holdings completed its purchase from the FTX debtors in May 2023, operating it as MIAX Derivatives Exchange. By 24 July 2024 it had delisted all physically settled products; it stopped accepting digital assets as collateral during 2025, and by 31 December 2025 held no digital assets for customers, having moved to cash-settled products. A joint venture of Robinhood and Susquehanna agreed in November 2025 to buy 90% of it, and the sale closed on 20 January 2026. The first US clearing house built for physically settled crypto ended its first decade clearing none.
Initial margin, variation margin and a new kind of collateral
The basic mechanics are those of any listed derivative. A clearing member posts initial margin sized to the loss a position could suffer while it is being closed out, and variation margin moves at least daily to settle changes in the value of open contracts. What has changed is what counts as collateral. On 8 December 2025 three CFTC staff divisions launched a digital assets pilot programme. Its no-action letter, 25-40, issued in response to a request from Coinbase Financial Markets, lets an FCM that files notice accept digital assets as customer margin collateral, limited for its first three months to payment stablecoins, bitcoin and ether, with weekly holdings reports filed with CFTC staff over the same period. Where a registered DCO accepts the asset, the FCM must apply that DCO's haircut, and the highest one if several DCOs accept it. Accompanying staff guidance on tokenised collateral set out expectations on haircuts, concentration limits and blockchain-specific failure scenarios in default management. Staff also withdrew a 21 October 2020 advisory that had restricted FCMs accepting virtual currencies as customer collateral. This is staff no-action relief and guidance, not a Commission rule. It means an initial margin figure can now rest on collateral that is itself volatile, which is why it belongs alongside our piece on liquidity and leverage in crypto market stress.
The default waterfall, and who absorbs a loss first
A typical CCP waterfall runs in this order: the defaulter's own margin, then its guaranty fund contribution, then a tranche of the clearing house's own capital (the "skin in the game"), then the guaranty fund contributions of the surviving members, and finally further assessments on those survivors. The order exists so that the clearing house's own money is at risk before members who did nothing wrong. That is why ownership matters. When the CFTC registered Bitnomial Clearinghouse, a commissioner's dissenting statement of 18 December 2023 set out comment-file concerns that common ownership of the clearing house, exchange and FCM could give a clearing house an incentive to delay declaring its affiliated FCM in default; that margin requirements could be tailored in the affiliate's favour; and that the failure of one affiliate could make a run on the clearing house more likely. The statement drew on filings from the Futures Industry Association, Better Markets and ISDA, among others, and objected that the approval was a two-page order carrying no conditions.
Vertical integration: the objection regulators keep raising
IOSCO reached the same theme from the securities side. It consulted in May 2023 and published final policy recommendations for crypto and digital asset markets on 16 November 2023, with preventing conflicts of interest at vertically integrated crypto-asset service providers among its key themes. The consultation had asked regulators to consider whether disaggregation, splitting functions into separate legal entities with separate boards and management, is appropriate, and whether to bar a platform from listing and trading assets in which it holds a material interest. These are recommendations to member regulators, not binding rules. The US decision on Bitnomial went the other way: the CFTC registered the integrated structure rather than requiring separation, over a public dissent.
Direct retail clearing: the CFTC reopens a 2022 question
Whether a retail client should clear a margined derivative directly with a clearing house, with no FCM in between, has been tested once. In March 2022 the CFTC sought public comment on a request from FTX US Derivatives, the former LedgerX, to amend its DCO registration so it could clear margined products for retail participants while keeping a non-intermediated model. The request drew opposition, including from Cboe, which warned of investor protection concerns, and it was withdrawn on 11 November 2022, the week FTX collapsed. On 18 December 2025 CFTC staff reopened the question with a Request for Comment on DCOs that clear directly for retail traders, covering a fully collateralised, non-intermediated model and a hybrid that combines it with FCM-intermediated clearing, and asking whether such "Retail DCOs" need tailored requirements on retail protection, governance and risk management, conflicts of interest, market conduct and transparency, or a registration sub-category of their own. The release set a comment deadline of 2 February 2026. It is a staff request for comment: no rule has been proposed or adopted on the back of it as of September 2026.
What is unresolved
Three questions remain open. Whether digital assets posted as margin hold up to their haircuts through a fast, correlated sell-off has not been tested at scale under the December 2025 relief. Whether a vertically integrated clearing house will manage its own affiliate's default as firmly as it would an unrelated member's is a question the CFTC answered once, over dissent, and may face again as more of the market consolidates into single-group stacks. And whether retail clients belong inside a clearing house's waterfall at all, rather than behind an FCM, is what the Request for Comment asks. For how exchange-cleared venues compare with other venue types where options are concerned, see our piece on crypto options and structured products.