Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. has turned the CFTC's crypto-perpetuals approval into a court fight, filing a June 18 complaint in Washington, D.C. federal court against the agency and Chairman Michael Selig.

The case targets the CFTC's May 29 order approving KalshiEX's BTCPERP contract, a perpetual contract tied to the spot price of bitcoin. The agency said the product could list as a futures contract and pointed to a funding-rate mechanism designed to keep the contract price aligned with bitcoin spot markets.

CME argues the order and related policy statement went too far. Its complaint says perpetual contracts should be treated as swaps under Dodd-Frank, not as ordinary futures, and asks the court to vacate the Kalshi approval and any self-certified products that relied on it.

The distinction matters because U.S. crypto venues have been trying to bring a product category that dominates offshore trading into regulated domestic markets. If CME succeeds, exchanges may need a slower or different approval path for perpetuals; if the CFTC prevails, Kalshi and other designated contract markets get a clearer route to list digital-asset perps under the futures framework.

CoinDesk reported that CME frames the dispute as both a legal classification issue and a market-structure fight, because perpetuals could compete with long-dated futures products. For now, the most conservative reading is that the lawsuit challenges the regulatory route, not the existence of crypto perps themselves.