Friday, June 19, 2026

🏴 The Perps Reckoning

Bankless Nation, how about some food for thought as you gear up for the long weekend?

First up, today's article breaks down why CME's new lawsuit against the CFTC over perpetual futures boils down to an incumbent trying to slow down a product it can't kill.

As for our latest Early Access episode, Arthur Hayes returned to Bankless with a sweeping macro thesis. He argues the AI bubble will eventually implode, and when the money printing follows, crypto will boom.

Bitcoin to $1M? We'll see. For now, let's get you up to speed.

— David C ✍️

p.s. Thanks to OKX. Not on OKX yet? New users can get up to $500 in BTC through the Bankless link. Not available in New York or Texas. Not investment advice.

. . .

PRIMER

Why CME Is Really Suing the CFTC Over Perps

Yesterday, CME, the country's dominant derivatives exchange, sued the CFTC over its recent approval of regulated crypto perpetual futures.

The exchange argues Kalshi's Bitcoin perp should be treated as a swap, not a futures contract, a classification shift that would push the product into a more restrictive, institution-facing rulebook. The CFTC called the suit "frivolous" and said it looks forward to dismissing it.

We've known for some time that major exchanges like CME and ICE have grown uneasy about the rise of perpetuals, an unease already visible in their push to have regulators scrutinize Hyperliquid over manipulation, sanctions evasion, anything they can find.

Why? Because regulators have finally opened a compliant path for Americans to trade an entirely new class of derivatives, one whose financial efficiency threatens the effectively monopolistic business model of these incumbents.

The Label Is the Business Model

CME's legal argument turns on a label.

If Kalshi's Bitcoin perp is a futures contract, it can trade on a regulated futures exchange, where regular U.S. users can access it. If it is a swap, it falls into a heavier rulebook built largely for institutional derivatives, making it harder to launch, harder to distribute, and functionally out of reach for most retail traders.

That distinction sounds technical, and it echoes the same fight playing out over prediction markets, but the effect here is simple: whether perps will be accessible to retail users, or reserved primarily for institutional actors.

CME's filing comes wrapped in safety language, but, as always, the motivation is financial. Perps threaten the part of CME's business built around expiration.

A normal futures contract expires. To hold the same exposure, a trader has to roll into a new contract before it does. CME collects another round of trading and clearing fees on every roll, and that churn feeds the market data business it sells on top.

A perpetual future doesn't expire. A trader holds the same position open indefinitely and settles periodic funding payments instead of rolling.

No roll means no recurring trade, and that breaks a rhythm CME's business is built on. The market already understands the threat. When regulators opened the door to regulated U.S. perps, shares of CME, Cboe, and ICE fell as investors priced in real competition.

Why Perps Keep Gaining Ground

None of this makes perps harmless. They can involve leverage, liquidations, and funding costs that quietly eat into a position over time. CME CEO Terry Duffy is right that many retail traders don't fully understand those risks, and the venues offering perps should do the work to make them clear.

But blocking regulated U.S. perps does not make demand disappear. It pushes Americans back offshore, where they get fewer disclosures, weaker oversight, and less protection when something breaks.

That is why the better answer is to regulate the instrument clearly: leverage limits, margin standards, and liquidation transparency.

Crypto is where this starts because the markets are already mature. That makes Bitcoin perps the easiest place for regulators to begin. But given the demand we've seen with HIP-3, it won't be long before the model stretches to stocks, indices, and ETFs.

Perps Trading Seizes Its Moment on Bankless

Wartime trading is onboarding retail to perpetuals as Trump-driven headlines move markets over the weekends.

Bankless •David Christopher

That is what makes CME's lawsuit so revealing. The exchange is asking for a reclassification, not a ban. You do not do that to a product you think you can kill. If you can kill it, you kill it. If you can't, you relocate it, cut it off to slow the bleed.

This is the history of crypto. A better technology emerges, users are drawn to its merits, incumbents call it dangerous, and the regulatory fight begins. Those fights have rarely decided whether the old model gets protected. They simply decide how long.

The Perpification has already begun, and all incumbents can hope to do is slow it down.

The Future of Perps in America on Bankless

CFTC Chairman Mike Selig maps the new U.S. perpetuals frontier on Bankless.

Bankless •William M. Peaster

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. . .

EARLY ACCESS

AI Crash = BTC to $1M?

Arthur Hayes is back on Bankless, and he's not bullish on everything.

After taking profits on HYPE, NEAR, and Zcash, Arthur sat down with David to explain why he thinks we're in the late stages of an AI bubble, and why the implosion of that bubble could be the single biggest catalyst for Bitcoin in history.

He also dove into oil, the Iran truce he doesn't trust, why ETH might have the cleanest mega-cap crypto setup right now, and what it's like to have invented the perpetual swap in 2016 and watch it take over the world.

Catch the full conversation! 👇

Watch in early access

Manage your account

Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time to time, we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.

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Rethinking One Of Bitcoin's Most Important On-Chain Thresholds

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Rethinking One Of Bitcoin's Most Important On-Chain Thresholds

Bitcoin Magazine Pro

Jun 19

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For years, on-chain analysis has relied on a single number to separate Bitcoin’s committed holders from its short-term traders: 155 days. Hold your Bitcoin longer than that, and you’re classified as a long-term holder. It’s one of the most widely used thresholds in the entire field, and it underpins a huge number of the metrics analysts rely on every day. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time digging into whether a static threshold still makes sense, and built a more dynamic approach that I think is more accurate and more useful.

Let’s cut to the chase:

The traditional 155-day long-term holder threshold is based on 2020 research and hasn’t kept pace with how Bitcoin holding behaviour has changed since.
A dynamic boundary that recalibrates daily currently sits at 114 days, 27% lower than the static standard.
Filtering out UTXOs that aren’t really economic transactions produces a cleaner, more accurate Realized Price.
Metrics rebuilt on this new boundary have historically marked cycle tops and bottoms with notable precision.
On these new metrics, Bitcoin is currently sitting in deep value territory.

A Fixed Threshold No Longer Fits

The original logic behind the 155-day mark was sound. It’s the point at which the probability of a holder spending their Bitcoin drops off sharply and then flattens out. Past that point, statistically, people tend to hold. The problem is that Bitcoin’s holder behaviour has shifted dramatically. Fewer people are using it as a peer-to-peer payment system, and far more are holding it indefinitely as a store of value, driven significantly by ETFs and treasury companies.

When the broad behaviour of the network changes this much, a fixed threshold set six years ago starts to potentially misrepresent what’s actually happening on-chain. So rather than a static number, the approach here uses a boundary that recalibrates every single day based on the entire history of Bitcoin transactions. Right now, that dynamic boundary sits at 114 days.

That might sound counterintuitive, a lower threshold for “long-term.” But it makes sense because people are holding as a store of value more than ever, and the point at which spending probability drops off now arrives sooner. You don’t need to hold as long before your likelihood of selling falls away significantly.

A Cleaner Realized Price

The second piece of this is the Realized Price, the average cost basis of all Bitcoin on the network, and arguably the single most important on-chain metric out there. The issue is that “all Bitcoin on the network” includes a lot of things that aren’t really economic transactions.

There’s Bitcoin dust, which would cost more to send than it’s actually worth and is effectively unspendable. There are genuinely unspendable outputs. There are inscriptions, which exploded in volume from 2023 onward and aren’t really value-transfer transactions in any meaningful sense. And there are freshly mined coins, which arrive every ten minutes and aren’t immediately spent, so counting them at issuance and again when they eventually move risks double-counting. Filtering all of that out produces what I’d consider a truer realised price. It sits slightly higher than the standard version, because it stops counting the cost basis of coins that will realistically never move again.

More Actionable Signals

The real test of any new methodology isn’t whether it’s clever, but whether it produces something more useful. So I rebuilt the standard on-chain metrics on this new foundation. The long-term holder SOPR, which measures whether long-term holders are selling at a profit or a loss, becomes considerably sharper when built on the dynamic boundary and viewed through historical quantiles. It has marked Bitcoin’s major cycle tops and bottoms with notable precision. Right now, it’s sitting at a reading comparable to the recent $60,000 low, and some of the lowest levels it has ever recorded.

Applying the same approach to Short-Term Holder MVRV produces a similar improvement. The big upside spikes align with major price rallies, and the deep downside readings align with major turning points.

Where We Are Now

Taking this quantile methodology and applying it to the filtered realized price produces upper and lower bands, a rough gauge of where Bitcoin might be heading based purely on real on-chain fundamental data, with no historical repainting. Viewed on a reactive, variable basis rather than through fixed thresholds, it’s been remarkably actionable.

Wrapping It All Up

Bear markets are for building. Rather than just waiting out the downside, this is exactly the kind of period to do genuinely useful work, and reworking one of the foundational thresholds of on-chain analysis felt like a worthwhile place to start.

This is a first effort, and it’s fully open. Every formula and filter used is published so anyone can replicate it, test it, and improve on it. If the methodology can be made better, that benefits the entire space, and that’s the whole point. The metrics built on this new boundary appear more accurate, more reactive, and more actionable, and right now they’re all pointing to Bitcoin currently being in deep value territory.

And watch our most recent YouTube video here: I Rebuilt Bitcoin’s 155-Day Holder Metric: It’s Now Even More Accurate

Matt Crosby (@MattCrosbyPro)

Director of Research & Analytics

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