On December 8, 2025, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), under acting chair Caroline D. Pham, announced a landmark digital-assets pilot program. This initiative permits futures commission merchants (FCMs) to accept select cryptocurrencies as collateral for derivatives trades, marking a significant regulatory advancement for crypto adoption.
The program explicitly allows Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) to be used as margin collateral in U.S. derivatives markets. For the first time, these digital assets are placed on equal footing with traditional forms of collateral like cash and U.S. Treasury bonds. This move provides long-awaited regulatory clarity for institutional desks, removing a major compliance hurdle that had kept significant traditional market funds on the sidelines.
Analysts suggest this shift in the macro setup favors risk assets like cryptocurrency. The announcement has intensified trader focus on identifying assets poised to benefit from anticipated institutional capital inflows. The news piece highlights several tokens, including privacy coin Monero (XMR) for its resilience and Chainlink (LINK) for its critical oracle infrastructure role in connecting smart contracts to real-world data, which gains importance as crypto integrates into formal derivatives markets.
Concurrently, on-chain data analysis from November 1 to December 5, 2025, reveals concentrated whale activity in the decentralized exchange (DEX) token segment. Hyperliquid (HYPE) led with a total buy volume of $16.6 billion, while newcomer Aster (ASTER), which launched in September 2025 with unofficial backing from former Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, attracted $5.7 billion. Aster notably recorded the single largest whale transaction in the dataset at nearly $191 million. Other DEX tokens like Aerodrome (AERO) on Base, PancakeSwap (CAKE), and Uniswap (UNI) saw comparatively smaller inflows, indicating selective capital rotation among major players.
