Coinbase opens 24/7 gold and silver perpetual futures with up to 25x leverage

It’s 3am in Singapore, and a Coinbase trader wants leverage on gold. Until this week the answer was: wait. COMEX has shut. The futures broker is asleep. Bullion is bullion, and the screen waits for New York to wake up.

That window is what Coinbase tried to close on Tuesday. The exchange listed two new perpetual contracts, GOLD-PERP and SILVER-PERP, on Coinbase International Exchange and Coinbase Advanced. Both reference the spot price of one troy ounce. Both settle in USDC. GOLD-PERP carries leverage of up to 25x. SILVER-PERP tops out at 20x. Neither expires. Neither needs rolling. And neither, for now, is open to anyone trading from a US IP.

In its blog post on Tuesday, Coinbase pitched the launch as plumbing rather than a price call. “These derivatives are designed to make 24/7 commodity exposure as accessible and capital-efficient as trading crypto perps,” the company wrote. The day it went live, gold was changing hands above $4,700 a troy ounce.

Crypto rails, metals payload

Look past the leverage figure for a second and the launch is doing something other than ramp risk. It is dragging metals onto the same set of rails Coinbase already runs for bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) perpetuals. USDC sits in the margin pool. A single liquidation engine governs the book. Funding rates anchor each contract to its index. A trader running a cross-asset position on Coinbase International Exchange now has gold and silver in the same wallet as crypto longs, margined in the same stablecoin, liquidated on one piece of code.

The competitive picture is straightforward. Binance, Bybit and OKX have been listing metals-referenced perpetuals for non-US users offshore for some time. Coinbase has joined them, with one twist: a US-regulated derivatives venue waiting in the wings.

That venue is Coinbase Derivatives Exchange (CDE). In the first quarter of 2026 it printed $52 billion of notional in commodity futures, equal to about 7.6 per cent of all contracts traded there. The new perpetuals do not run through CDE. They run offshore, on the international book. But the engineering work to wire metals into a USDC-margined perpetual is now done, and Coinbase has signaled that it plans to port the design home as soon as US rules allow.

What the CFTC has signaled

The “as soon as” routes through the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. On March 3, Bloomberg reported that CFTC Chairman Mike Selig expected the agency to issue a perpetual-futures framework “within the next month or so”. Selig made the comment to an industry audience earlier that week. The framework, he said, would cover leverage caps, margin methodology, funding-rate transparency, liquidation procedures and clearing arrangements for contracts that never expire.

The framework has not landed yet. Until it does, perpetual futures sit in a US regulatory grey zone. CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Markets are technically able to self-certify new products, perpetuals included, but no DCM has yet listed a 24/7 leveraged metals contract for US retail. What Coinbase has said is that it is “working with the CFTC to eventually bring 24/7 gold and silver trading to eligible US traders” through CDE.

Where the framework will likely bite is retail leverage. Twenty-five times on a spot-metals exposure, delivered through an exchange wallet, sits well above the effective margin a retail trader can pull on COMEX gold or silver futures via a futures commission merchant. Selig’s framework is expected to put leverage limits, position limits and real-time margin monitoring on the table as the price of admission for any DCM hosting a perpetual contract. Whether a 25x ceiling clears that bar for US retail is the open question.

Where this lands for traders

Non-US retail gets a single venue for crypto, equity proxies and now metals, all margined in USDC. For anyone running cross-asset positioning on Coinbase International Exchange, that is a real capital-efficiency win. It also pulls some of the offshore metals-perp flow that previously gravitated to Binance, Bybit or OKX.

US retail does not get any of that today. A 24/7 leveraged gold position in a brokerage account in Ohio is not a product anyone can open right now. On the trajectory Selig laid out in March, it is a product that could exist before the end of 2026, contingent on the framework dropping and on Coinbase electing to self-certify a US version through CDE.

For COMEX and the wider CME complex, the message is more pointed. Coinbase has put a parallel commodity-derivatives stack on crypto rails, with stated intent to slide it onto US-regulated infrastructure once the rules allow. The CFTC framework will decide how much of that stack ends up under its umbrella and how much keeps living on the international book.

Bitcoin, for what it is worth, traded near $80,945 on Wednesday, capping a week in which altcoins outperformed the majors and named analysts including Fundstrat’s Tom Lee and BitMEX’s Arthur Hayes laid out longer-horizon price targets for the asset that started this infrastructure conversation in the first place. From this week the metals desk sits next to it on the same exchange, in the same stablecoin, on the same 24-hour clock.