EDXM International has launched a regulated perpetual futures exchange in Singapore in July this year as Coinbase Financial Markets also made CFTC-regulated perpetual style futures available to U.S. customers in the same month.

On 23 July 2025 EDXM International’s new perpetual futures exchange  went live for institutional traders to trade contracts across 44 trading pairs, including bitcoin, ethereum, solana and XRP. In contrast to traditional futures contracts, which have a fixed expiration date and settlement price, perpetual futures have no expiry and are constantly adjusted by a mechanism called the funding rate, which helps align the futures price with the spot price of the underlying.

Tony Acuña-Rohter, who has been chief executive of EDX Markets since last December, told Markets Media that the firm’s exchanges are built for institutions, so it is very focused on providing the best cost to trade. He said: “We have an unconflicted business model and we are not trying to vertically integrate the broker, market maker and exchange, which may lead to bad outcomes like we saw with FTX.”

EDXM International holds collateral so that it is bankruptcy remote and does not do title transfer.

In June 2023 the firm launched EDX Markets, a crypto spot marketplace in the U.S. for institutions. Acuña-Rohter said the spot exchange is almost a preview of what is coming on the perpetuals side. He added: “We’ve proven the model and we have the biggest names in finance on board.”

The new venue is supported by a network of liquidity providers, prime brokerage and OEMS partners, including Amber Group, CoinRoutes, DV Chain, Hidden Road Partners, LTP, and Virtu Financial. It is powered by the company’s in-house, proprietary matching engine which is designed to provide the low-latency trading required by institutions. EDXM International claimed its pricing consistently outperforms incumbent crypto exchanges, with the cost to trade better or on par with global Tier 1 exchanges.

Acuña-Rohter added that the very stable low-latency technology has a response time in microseconds, which allows market makers to make the best possible prices. Market makers are also allowed to tag their orders as being only for retail, so they do not have to worry about running into another market maker.

“We have built our matching engine to be very fair from a market structure perspective because everything is totally ordered,” he added. “The instant an order reaches our system, there is no way for another order to go in front. There is no skipping the line.”

In addition to the technology, Acuña-Rohter said its proprietary smart collateral management system is another differentiator. EDXM International offers 44 pairs of perpetual futures  business and needs to allow market makers to safely quote on all its coins with the least amount of collateral.

Acuña-Rohter said: “Capital efficiency is a big attraction for market makers and also helps us scale very quickly as we plan to have around 100 coins by the end of the year.”

Luke Li, co-founder and head of markets at Amber Group, said in a statement: “EDXM International’s institutional-grade infrastructure and focus on capital efficiency resonate strongly with our mission to help shape a more mature and accessible market for institutional participants globally.”

The perpetual futures venue’s risk engine calculations allow different kinds of collateral which enables very capital efficient trading.  The smart collateral management system also protects market makers from filling orders over their risk limits, according to Acuña-Rohter.

“With EDX managing the underlying processes, we are commoditizing liquidity provisioning, allowing market makers to focus on market making,” he said.

In the venue’s pre-trade risk controls, collateral is counted against orders that are resting in the same instrument. Once a trade is executed, the model inspects all the order books to check if they would break the risk parameters and then automatically cancels those orders for the market maker. Acuña-Rohter explained this takes responsibility away from the market maker so they can confidently make quotes, knowing that after every trade EDX will look at their positions and working orders and appropriately cancel orders that may be resting.

In this initial phase, we have portfolio margining in our perpetual futures business,” said Acuña-Rohter. “Towards the end of the year, we want to do cross-margining with our spot exchange.”

U.S. perpetual futures

Perpetual futures account for approximately 90% of global crypto derivatives trading volumes, but were not allowed to be sold to traders in the U.S. In July Coinbase Financial Markets launched perpetual-style futures in the US for retail traders. The CFTC-regulated contracts have no monthly expiration dates and are long-dated with expiration dates of five years and traders have access  up to 10x intraday leverage.

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive of Coinbase Global, said on the crypto firm’s second quarter earnings call on 31 July 2025 that the perpetual style futures had hit an all-time high in trading volume.

Alesia Haas, chief financial officer of Coinbase said on the call that bringing perpetual style futures to the U.S. is a “real innovation.”

“We also paired that with 24/7 markets with bitcoin and ethereum contracts,” she added. “We are in the earliest of days with these products, but I think it’s important to note that we’ve seen volumes double week over week.”

That's a wrap on Week 1 of US Perpetual-Style Futures.

→ $1.3B+ in notional volume
→ 2.4M+ contracts traded

And we’re just getting started. pic.twitter.com/m93hylMNcD

— Coinbase Institutional 🛡️ (@CoinbaseInsto) July 28, 2025

In April this year Bitnomial Exchange, a CFTC-regulated designated contract market (DCM), announced the self-certification of the first perpetual futures contracts ever listed on a U.S. exchange. Trading began with the launch of BTC/USD perpetual futures, available initially to institutional participants.

Michael Dunn, president of Bitnomial Exchange, said in a statement at the time: “Bitnomial’s perpetual futures are built with eight-hour funding rate intervals, matching the market structure used by offshore venues that dominate crypto derivatives volume. This structural parity allows traders to integrate Bitnomial seamlessly into their existing trading systems—bringing familiar mechanics to a fully regulated U.S. marketplace.”

Acuña-Rohter said the regulatory environment is changing very quickly and EDX is “keeping its finger on the pulse.” He said: “We will onboard U.S institutions as soon as we believe that it is safe and sound.”

EDX is in constant communication with large banks and brokerages and they are positioning and making sure they have a game plan when the regulatory clarity is sufficient for them to come into the market, according to Acuña-Rohter.

The U.S. has passed the GENIUS Act covering the regulation of stablecoins and legislators are discussing the CLARITY Act covering crypto market structure. EDX is very excited about provisions in the CLARITY bill allowing broker-dealers to offer crypto and vertically disintegrating some of the incumbents where customers are captive to one exchange. Acuña-Rohter believes orders should be routed where they will be best executed to allow for more competition across venues.

“Our strategy has not changed and it is all about executing and scaling,” Acuña-Rohter added, “These things take time, so 2026 will be a great year.”