Kraken Launches CME Futures Trading

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken on Thursday revealed it has added support for CME futures contracts, allowing users to trade traditional markets such as equities and commodities alongside crypto assets.

The new offering is available through Kraken Derivatives US, which connects users directly to CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX via a regulated futures commission merchant. The integration lets traders access contracts linked to the S&P 500, Nasdaq, gold, oil, and major currency pairs. This is in addition to existing Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Solana (SOL) futures.

The platform is available to both retail and professional clients, the blog post explained, offering different market data access levels and a standard fee rate of 0.5 basis points per trade.

Kraken’s expansion into CME futures underscores the growing push by both crypto and traditional finance platforms to consolidate services onto a single platform. It also reflects a broader convergence between crypto and conventional markets.

The move comes as exchanges are increasingly diversifying beyond digital assets. A recent report by Animoca Brands highlighted a growing trend of centralized platforms evolving into so-called “universal exchanges” (UEXs) by offering access to on-chain tokens and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), The Defiant previously reported.

Moreover, the new integration positions Kraken to compete more directly with established brokerage and trading platforms that already offer access to global futures markets, such as Charles Schwab.

Kraken is one of the largest U.S.-based centralized exchanges (CEXs), reporting $1.5 billion in revenue and $664 billion in trading volume in 2024, according to company documents. In the past 24 hours, Kraken has recorded around $1.5 billion in trading volume, according to data from CoinGecko.

The announcement is the latest in a series of expansions by Kraken. Last month, the exchange said it would launch tokenized versions of U.S. stocks on Ethereum via xStocks, a platform developed by Backed. Kraken currently offers xStocks to non-U.S. users on Solana, Tron, and BNB Chain.

And in April, the exchange began offering trading for more than 11,000 U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs to U.S. users, with plans to expand the service to the U.K., Europe, and Australia in the future.