OKX, ICE Launch Regulated Brent and WTI Perpetuals

OKX and Intercontinental Exchange launched regulated perpetual futures tied to ICE’s Brent and WTI benchmarks on Friday, offering access to traders outside the United States in the UAE, Europe, Australia and Singapore.

Perpetual futures are derivatives that do not have a fixed expiration date. Positions are kept aligned with the underlying index through periodic funding payments between long and short holders. The new contracts reference ICE’s prices for Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude.

Intercontinental Exchange provided the pricing linkage to its Brent and WTI futures benchmarks. OKX said the product expands regulated access to commodity markets through digital asset infrastructure.

Haider Rafique, OKX Global Managing Partner, described the offering: “Oil markets are critical to the world economy. Bringing them into regulated perpetual futures is exactly the kind of bridge between traditional and digital markets that market participants have been asking for.”

The launch comes while the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigate reports of large, suspicious oil trades that occurred before high-profile international announcements.

Exchanges and clearinghouses have raised market integrity concerns about decentralized platforms that offer open access perpetuals without standard know-your-customer checks. One decentralized exchange that popularized permissionless perpetuals launched in 2023 and holds several billion dollars in outstanding trades; its operators have publicly defended the platform.

Centralized venues retain larger shares of global crypto derivatives open interest. Industry trackers show Binance with about $26 billion in notional open interest, the decentralized platform with roughly $9.6 billion in outstanding trades, and OKX with about $8.2 billion.

Traders and regulators will monitor whether the ICE-linked perpetuals attract trading volume away from decentralized venues. The contracts provide an additional regulated route for non-U.S. traders to access crypto-native derivatives tied to established oil price benchmarks.