- ICE, NYSE’s parent company, is launching oil perpetual futures that never expire on OKX as it ramps up its fight against Hyperliquid.
- It has also partnered with CME to pressure US lawmakers to crack down on Hyperliquid and bring it under CFTC jurisdiction.
Hyperliquid has become the next big thing in crypto, generating more revenue than most established Layer 1s in Q1 this year. This rapid growth is starting to alarm legacy players, and now they are launching similar products and calling on favors in Washington to crack down on it.
Earlier today, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, revealed that it’s preparing to launch oil futures that never expire. ICE will launch the new futures on the OKX exchange, competing directly with Hyperliquid, whose rise has been based on perpetuals.
The owner of the New York Stock Exchange is working with crypto exchange operator OKX to launch oil futures contracts that never expire https://t.co/VGvkCjtdNu
— Bloomberg (@business) May 22, 2026
ICE says that the new contracts on OKX will be underpinned by its futures prices for Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate, the two most popular benchmarks for oil prices globally. The contracts will only be available in jurisdictions where OKX has a license to offer perpetual futures.
The choice of OKX to offer these new contracts is no coincidence; ICE holds a stake in the crypto exchange, investing in a funding round in March that valued the exchange at $25 billion.
Trabue Bland, the Senior Vice President for Futures at ICE, commented:
“These new OKX perpetual contracts, based on ICE’s deep, liquid, transparent, and global oil markets, allow OKX’s customer base of 120 million retail traders to access energy benchmark products.”
Haider Rafique, the managing partner at OKX, said that the new contracts are “exactly the kind of bridge between traditional and digital markets that market participants have been asking for.”
He added:
“This launch gives retail traders access to the world’s most important energy benchmarks in a regulated, transparent environment. That’s a meaningful step forward as we modernize money and markets.”
The Fight Against Hyperliquid
The new product is the latest effort by legacy players against Hyperliquid. For starters, “futures that never expire” are simply perpetuals, and launching these perps on OKX competes directly with Hyperliquid, whose rise was driven by crypto perpetuals.
Competing for the same market is legal and vital for consumers to get the best value. However, ICE is not stopping there. The company has partnered with CME, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, to push for a crackdown on Hyperliquid. Sources in Washington say the two have been pressuring regulators to investigate the DeFi protocol for market manipulation and evading sanctions.
The two legacy giants further claimed that Hyperliquid’s marketplace creates systemic risk for traditional finance.
However, the DeFi protocol sees the regulatory pressure for the thinly veiled attack it is. The Hyperliquid Policy Center, the network’s lobbying arm, dismissed the CME’s concerns as “unfounded.”
The Center noted that the network records all trades immutably on-chain, “making it a uniquely hostile environment for insider trading or price manipulation.”
Other industry voices have supported Hyperliquid. Haseeb Qureshi, the managing partner at VC firm Dragonfly, noted that the CME and ICE are only coming after Hyperliquid because it’s expanding beyond crypto and into commodities, where they have enjoyed monopolistic control.
"It's a lot scarier to make the CME your enemy than Binance. CME has much bigger guns"
Haseeb on why Hyperliquid has poked the hornet's nest in finance
"Binance is Binance, they're powerful but what are they gonna do? Push up a meme coin? But if CME is coming after you, they… https://t.co/OteZxRRldU pic.twitter.com/nS9WQd3l2L
— Arjun (@clipsofcrypto) May 21, 2026
