Coinbase's long-awaited push into global crypto perps is also opening an old wound for the company, with CEO Brian Armstrong pointing to years of offshore rivals serving U.S. traders while Coinbase waited for a legal route at home.
Armstrong, who founded and now leads Coinbase, the largest publicly traded U.S. crypto exchange, said in a Wednesday X post that the exchange had been approved to offer "true global crypto perps" to U.S. users after years of regulatory work.
- The approval refers to a May 29 CFTC interpretive and no-action letter that lets Coinbase route U.S. customers to certain crypto derivatives listed on Deribit, a crypto derivatives exchange acquired by Coinbase in 2025.
- Perpetual futures, or just perps, are crypto derivatives with no expiration date.
- They became one of crypto's most traded products offshore because they let traders take leveraged long or short exposure without holding the underlying token.
But Armstrong's sharpest shot was about how much of that offshore market may have been American all along.
"If we're being honest, probably ~half of all perpetual futures volume was Americans using offshore products via VPN with loose KYC controls (an open secret in the industry)."
Brian Armstrong
Brian Armstrong
But it's not clear where Armstrong's data comes from
The CFTC letter doesn't back the claim that Americans made up about half of global perps volume, so the figure should be treated as his personal estimate.
The CFTC letter doesn't back the claim that Americans made up about half of global perps volume, so the figure should be treated as his personal estimate.
Armstrong said that lack of enforcement was frustrating for Coinbase as a U.S. company following domestic rules.
"Penalties for this were rarely, if ever, enforced, which as you can imagine, was frustrating for us as an American company following the rules. Others set up offshore entities and found ways around it."
Brian Armstrong
Brian Armstrong
- Data from CoinGecko shows the top 10 centralized perp exchanges processed over $86 trillion in volume in 2025, with decentralized perp exchanges adding another $6.7 trillion.