CFTC to host public roundtable on 24/7 derivatives trading on Dec. 15

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will hold a public roundtable on Dec. 15 to examine whether derivatives markets could run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The session will take place at the CFTC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and will be livestreamed for anyone who wants to watch. It follows a Request for Comment the agency issued over the summer, which means this is the second formal step in the process, not the first.

What’s on the agenda

The CFTC has flagged three main discussion areas.

Overnight trading comes first. This covers the mechanics of keeping contracts trading through hours when activity has traditionally slowed or stopped altogether.

Tokenization is the second topic. Tokenization means representing an asset, or a claim on it, as a digital token on a blockchain-style ledger.

Infrastructure and staffing round out the list. A market that never closes needs systems that never go down, and people available to watch them at 3 a.m. on a Sunday.

The agency’s framing centers on operational, structural, and risk-management challenges. That signals the CFTC is less interested in whether 24/7 trading sounds appealing and more interested in what could break if it happens.

How we got here

The announcement came on Oct. 28, giving market participants roughly seven weeks to prepare before the Dec. 15 session.

The CFTC has described its goal as supporting market innovation while still protecting participants and preserving trading integrity.

The session will focus mainly on traditional derivatives rather than digital-asset products. Still, the presence of tokenization on the agenda shows the two worlds are increasingly being discussed in the same room.

The broader backdrop includes continued exploration of extended trading mechanisms and perpetual contracts. Perpetual contracts are futures-style instruments with no expiration date, so traders can hold positions indefinitely rather than rolling them over each month.

What this means for traders and markets

For institutional investors, the most immediate implication is operational. If derivatives move toward continuous trading, firms will need risk systems, monitoring, and staff that can handle positions moving at any hour.

Margin is a useful example of the problem. When prices can move overnight or over a weekend with no break, the question of when collateral gets called, and how fast it must be posted, becomes much more pressing. The roundtable’s focus on risk management suggests regulators know this is where many of the sharp edges are.

The tokenization thread is the one digital-asset watchers will likely focus on. Tokenized assets are often pitched on the promise of always-on settlement and transfer. Having that topic sit alongside a regulator’s 24/7 trading discussion suggests the two ideas are being evaluated as related pieces of the same puzzle, even if the session itself centers on traditional products.

Nothing about the roundtable creates new rules on its own. It is a fact-finding exercise, and its value lies in what participants put on the record about costs, risks, and readiness.