Intercontinental Exchange and CME Group, two of the world's biggest exchange operators, are reportedly pressing U.S. officials to rein in Hyperliquid after oil-linked trading on the crypto platform surged during the Iran conflict.
According to a Bloomberg report, which cites sources close to the matter, ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and CME have told the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Capitol Hill officials that Hyperliquid's decentralized trading model could distort oil prices or be used for manipulation and sanctions evasion.
Hyperliquid, the decentralized crypto exchange best known for perpetual futures, lets users trade without the same customer checks required on U.S. exchanges. That is the core regulatory complaint.
But the business complaint is hard to miss. Hyperliquid has moved beyond crypto tokens into oil, stocks and other assets that were mostly controlled by regulated exchanges for decades.
Oil-linked contracts on Hyperliquid averaged more than $700 million in daily volume in April, up from only a few million dollars a day before the Iran war, per Artemis data. Positions in oil tokens made up nearly a quarter of Hyperliquid exchange positions at the start of May, up from under 5% before the war.
ICE and CME argue that this matters because oil benchmarks are not just trader toys. Airlines, refiners, producers and commodity desks rely on them to price fuel, hedge costs and manage risk.
Trabue Bland, ICE's senior vice president for futures exchanges, told Bloomberg that if something could affect those benchmarks while sitting "completely outside of anyone's oversight," that is "problematic." He said platforms functioning as exchanges should have to register and meet the same obligations as exchanges.
Michael Selig, the CFTC chairman, has also flagged the issue. Bloomberg said Selig warned in early May that Hyperliquid could "end up influencing the spot market price or the futures market price on our registered platforms."
Hyperliquid pushes back
Hyperliquid's side is that the platform is more transparent than traditional exchanges, not less.
George Godsal, a spokesman for Hyperliquid's developers, told Bloomberg that every trade, liquidation and funding payment is publicly verifiable on-chain "in a way that no traditional exchange can match."
The Hyperliquid Policy Center, an advocacy group launched in February with $29 million worth of HYPE tokens from the Hyper Foundation, also pushed back after Bloomberg's report. The group said in an X post that the traditional exchanges' concerns were "unfounded" and argued that Hyperliquid's public on-chain record makes it a "uniquely hostile environment" for insider trading or price manipulation.
Jeff Yan, Hyperliquid's co-founder, said on X that he spent the past few days in Washington with the policy center discussing Hyperliquid, on-chain derivatives and a regulatory path for U.S. access, noting that "some conversations were technical with an impressive baseline understanding of Hyperliquid."
That timing matters. The Senate Banking Committee just advanced the CLARITY Act, a crypto market-structure bill that could shape how digital commodity markets are regulated.