CME Group NASDAQ: CME Chairman and CEO Terry Duffy sharply criticized the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s approval of a Bitcoin perpetual futures contract for Kalshi, saying the product does not fit his view of a futures contract and raises risks for retail investors.
Speaking at an investor conference, Duffy said the CFTC handled the contract under what he described as a full review process for products that are “new or novel or complex,” but completed that review faster than the shorter self-certification process. He said that troubled him because the agency’s order described the product as novel and complex.
Duffy argued that the Commodity Exchange Act defines a futures contract as one with a future delivery or expiration date. “Nowhere does it contemplate that it can go on in perpetuity,” he said. “A perpetuity or perpetual is a contract that never ends.” He said if the product is anything, “that is a swap.”
Duffy Raises Concerns Over Leverage and Retail Risk
Duffy said his concerns center on leverage, auto-liquidation and whether perpetual contracts can be used effectively by institutions for hedging. He compared leverage available in some European Union perpetual products, which he said can range from 20 times to 250 times, with CME’s U.S. institutional crypto leverage of 5-to-1.
“How can that possibly be something that’s sustainable?” Duffy said.
He said perpetual contracts rely on funding rates to keep prices tied to spot markets, which can erode the economics of a hedge. Using an airline hedging crude oil as an example, Duffy said a company could face funding-rate costs as prices rise, undermining the protection the hedge was intended to provide.
Duffy also warned that high leverage could attract retail traders who may not understand the risks. He said he has spent decades building retail participation with education and tools, but believes some highly leveraged products could put customers in positions they should not be in.
“I really believe it’s 2007,” Duffy said, comparing the current speculation environment to the housing market period before the financial crisis. He clarified later that his reference to Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX was about leverage and auto-liquidation models, not an accusation of wrongdoing against Kalshi or its leadership.
CME’s Stance on Perpetuals Remains Undecided
Asked whether CME would participate if perpetual products proliferate in the U.S., Duffy said he was not saying the company would or would not enter the market. However, he repeatedly said the product does not align with CME’s core institutional risk-management business.
“A perpetual is unhedgeable,” Duffy said. “A perpetual is tied to the spot market.”
Duffy said 85% to 90% of CME’s business is institutionally driven, and the company has 135 million open positions and holds $400 billion of capital on behalf of major institutions. He said CME is not focused on “battling away for the small retail participants with no capital.”
On a separate issue, Duffy said he believes an S&P 500 perpetual product licensed to TradeXYZ on the Hyperliquid blockchain infringes on CME’s licensing agreement with S&P Global. “I know it’s infringing on my license agreement with them,” he said, adding that CME is working with S&P Global and expects to reach a solution over time.
Macro Risk and New Product Areas
Asked about the environment for CME’s business after a record first quarter in which average daily volume rose 22% and open interest increased 11%, Duffy said geopolitical risk remains the largest risk facing markets. He cited conflict involving Iran, Russia’s war in Ukraine and potential future tensions involving China and Taiwan.
Duffy said investors may be too dismissive of these risks and emphasized the importance of portfolio diversification and risk management. He said many investors remain concentrated in a small number of major technology and artificial intelligence-related stocks.
CME is also preparing to relaunch single-stock futures. Duffy said the key difference from the prior OneChicago effort is timing, not structure. He said the company expects to focus on about 50 or fewer of the world’s largest market-cap companies and sees the product as a risk-management tool for both retail and institutional investors.
Duffy also discussed CME’s partnership with Silicon Data for compute futures, describing the potential asset class as a way to manage risk tied to GPUs, CPUs and data-center-related infrastructure. He said product specifications have not yet been released, but he is “more excited about the potential of the asset class to be traded.”
Prediction Markets, Capital Returns and Efficiency
Duffy said CME’s prediction market effort with FanDuel began as a distribution opportunity, leveraging FanDuel’s large customer base. The analyst noted that since going live in December, the business has surpassed 270 million contracts traded and attracted more than 150,000 new accounts.
Duffy said he views prediction markets as gambling, but added that CME will participate where regulators allow the products and where contracts do not violate Commodity Exchange Act restrictions on contracts readily susceptible to manipulation. He said CME has seen encouraging activity in economic-event contracts, at times exceeding sports-related contracts.
On capital allocation, Duffy said he remains committed to returning capital to shareholders through dividends and other means, while also pursuing acquisitions only when they benefit CME’s users and, by extension, shareholders. The analyst said CME returned $3.2 billion to shareholders in the first quarter and had another $758 million in asset sale proceeds left to deploy.
Looking ahead, Duffy said CME’s biggest opportunities will likely come from improving market efficiencies. He pointed to capital efficiencies CME creates for large participants and said future innovations could include stablecoin applications within CME’s ecosystem to reduce payment friction and support 24/7 trading.
About CME Group NASDAQ: CME
CME Group Inc is a global markets company that operates some of the world's largest and most liquid derivatives exchanges, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and COMEX. The firm offers futures and options contracts across a broad range of asset classes — including interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities and metals — and serves a diverse client base of institutional investors, commercial hedgers, brokers and retail participants.
The company's core services include electronic trading on the CME Globex platform, central clearing through CME Clearing, and distribution of market data, indexes and analytics.
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