Written by: Karol Sobieraj, Founder & CEO, Digital Colliers
Kalshi filed paperwork this week asking the CFTC to greenlight single-stock perpetual futures for US retail accounts. Coinbase beat them to the punch by a few days with a similar application. If either filing gets approval, retail brokers will face a supervision problem they do not currently have the data infrastructure to solve.
What supervision looks like for perpetual futures
Perpetual futures carry no expiration date and no delivery. Traders roll positions indefinitely, paying or receiving a funding rate every few hours to keep the contract price anchored to the spot price. That structure makes them easy to trade but hard to supervise.
Brokers will need to track position size, margin utilisation, and leverage in real time for every retail account holding these products. Most retail brokers built their surveillance systems for equities and options. Those systems snapshot positions at end-of-day or check thresholds batch-style every few hours. Perpetual futures require continuous monitoring because leverage can compound within minutes.
The supervision requirements will likely mirror what crypto brokers already face. Expect position limits, leverage caps, suitability checks, and mandatory circuit breakers. The data model to support those requirements does not exist at most US retail brokers today.
Real-time position monitoring
The first pillar is continuous position tracking. Brokers need to know what every retail account holds, what their margin cushion looks like, and whether they are approaching liquidation thresholds. That data needs to refresh every time the trader adjusts the position or the funding rate ticks.
Most retail brokerage platforms poll position data every few minutes at best. That lag is fine for equities. It breaks for perpetual futures, where a trader can double their leverage in 30 seconds and hit the liquidation price before the next polling interval. Real-time streaming data is the only answer, and that requires infrastructure most brokers do not have.
The analogy here is AML transaction monitoring. Mid-market banks already struggle with false-positive rates that run 85-95% on their AML surveillance systems. Those systems were built for batch processing, not real-time streaming. Brokers shipping perpetual futures will face the same data quality problem, but with tighter time windows.
Some firms will try to solve this with ML-based surveillance. The track record is not encouraging. 88% of AI proof-of-concepts never reach widescale deployment. Building real-time monitoring infrastructure is hard enough without layering experimental ML on top.
Leverage caps and suitability documentation
The second pillar is automated leverage caps. Regulators will almost certainly mandate maximum leverage ratios for retail accounts, probably 5x or 10x depending on the underlying. Brokers need to enforce those caps at the order-entry layer, not after the fact.
That means tying leverage calculations into the order management system and rejecting orders that would push the account over the limit. Most retail platforms can handle static position limits, but dynamic leverage caps require live margin calculations and real-time account equity snapshots.
The third pillar is suitability documentation. Brokers will need to prove that every retail customer holding perpetual futures passed a suitability check and acknowledged the risks. That documentation needs to be machine-readable and linked to every position, so regulators can audit compliance without manually pulling account records.
Digital operational resilience expectations are already tightening. DORA has been in force since 17 January 2025 in the EU, and US regulators are watching closely. Brokers that ship perpetual futures without the data infrastructure to monitor and document them will fail their first audit.