The White House hosted a meeting with top crypto industry and prediction market executives on August 19, 2026. Donald Trump urged Congress to pass a "fair version" of the CLARITY Act and said the CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid to the United States "in a fully compliant and legal fashion".
The gathering included leaders from Coinbase, Robinhood, Ripple, Kraken, Gemini, Nasdaq and ICE, along with SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig. Trump called the CLARITY Act "very powerful structure legislation" that would keep the US "ahead of China". The bill, stalled in the Senate for months, is meant to clarify the split of powers between the SEC and the CFTC and when a token is a security or a commodity.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong estimated the bill could clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, with a cloture motion expected on September 15, and said it would make US crypto policy "durable into the future, so it could survive for decades and decades to come". Trump added that the law is "very bipartisan", with "a lot of Democrats" supporting it.
The most concrete and novel development concerns Hyperliquid, the leading decentralized perpetual futures exchange. The platform, which currently blocks US users, could enter the regulatory perimeter that governs CME and ICE. "I understand that Mike is also working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion, working very hard on that," Trump said, referring to Michael Selig. An onshore entry would also resolve, in Hyperliquid's favor, the campaign incumbent exchanges have run since May to bring the platform under federal oversight or keep it away from US customers.
Markets responded quickly: HYPE gained about 19 percent in 24 hours, with a market capitalization near 17.6 billion dollars, while shares of Hyperliquid Strategies, the Nasdaq-listed vehicle holding HYPE as its core strategy, closed up 30.4 percent at 9.39 dollars, its largest single-day gain on record. CME Group (-1.7 percent) and Cboe (-3.5 percent) fell on the prospect of direct competition for institutional order flow. Options volume in Hyperliquid Strategies ran nearly eight times its 30-day average, with more than 120,000 calls traded against fewer than 8,000 puts.
Hyperliquid cleared 6.19 billion dollars in perpetual volume over the past 24 hours and 177.9 billion over 30 days, with 11.72 billion in open interest and 5.08 trillion in cumulative volume since launch, according to DefiLlama data cited by The Defiant. None of that volume comes from US retail accounts.
The push for a regulated landing follows months of regulatory battles: CME and ICE approached regulators on May 15 over onchain commodity perps, flagging manipulation risks, and CME sued the CFTC on June 18. Selig cleared the first true bitcoin perpetual on a CFTC-registered exchange on May 29. On August 20 the CFTC holds its first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting, with crypto assets, artificial intelligence and prediction markets on the agenda: the moment when, according to Selig himself, more details on the regulatory path will arrive.
Open questions remain: the CFTC has opened no formal docket on Hyperliquid, and requirements such as registration, identity verification and leverage limits do not map neatly onto a non-custodial model. For the industry, however, the signal is clear: infrastructure considered "regulatory-toxic" until recently is now being discussed openly at the White House.
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