November 18, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update. Crypto Twitter is weirder when the prices are going down. We are proud that by reading the Meridian Update you can stay informed without experiencing that weirdness. Let’s dive in.

We haven’t talked about perpetual futures in a while

CBOE, founded as the Chicago Board Options Exchange, is the world’s largest options exchange. Today we learned that CBOE has an excellent slogan on its website:

“Life is Better With Options”

How wonderful. Anyway:

“[CBOE] today announced its new Cboe Bitcoin Continuous Futures (PBT) and Cboe Ether Continuous Futures (PET) are planned to begin trading on Cboe Futures Exchange, LLC (CFE) beginning December 15, 2025, subject to regulatory review.

Cboe's Continuous Futures are designed to offer traders long-term exposure to bitcoin and ether. The contracts will have a 10-year expiration at listing and a daily cash adjustment, effectively creating perpetual-style exposure while eliminating the need to periodically roll positions. Continuous Futures are designed to provide the same benefits many investors utilize traditional futures for, such as capital efficiency, volatility management, tactical trading, and the ability to enter short positions.”

We previously described perpetual futures (or “perps”) as follows:

“A simple model of perps is they are, basically, a way to borrow money. With that borrowed money, you can increase how much you are investing in an asset. That is, if you believe the price of an asset will go up, you can put more money than you currently have toward that belief. This is “going long” with a perp. Or, with that borrowed money, you can increase how much you are investing in an asset going down. That is, if you believe the price of an asset will go down, you can put more money than you currently have toward that belief. This is “going short” with a perp.”

We forgot to mention that investors utilize them for “capital efficiency, volatility management, tactical trading, and the ability to enter short positions.” That was rude of us.

This news kind of falls into a running theme here at the Meridian Update. People want to buy on-chain assets in off-chain ways. Included in that, apparently, is that people want to, or at least soon will be able to, buy perpetual futures of on-chain assets on CBOE. Why not.

Not tax advice, but maybe pay your taxes when you trade crypto on international exchanges?

Crypto Twitter seemed, umm, interested in this news from the White House:

“The White House is reviewing a proposed rule that would grant the Internal Revenue Service access to information on U.S. taxpayers’ digital asset transactions conducted in foreign jurisdictions.”

To be clear, the White House isn’t reviewing a proposed rule that would make U.S. taxpayers’ digital asset transactions conducted in foreign jurisdictions taxable. Not tax advice, but they already are. No, the White House is reviewing a proposed rule that would grant the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) access to information on U.S. taxpayers’ digital asset transactions conducted in foreign jurisdictions.

There are two ways to think about this. The first is, OK. The second is, Wait, the IRS can’t access information on U.S. taxpayers’ digital asset transactions conducted in foreign jurisdictions? How does it determine what digital asset transactions were conducted in a foreign jurisdiction if they are all happening on-chain, which in theory means they are happening everywhere and nowhere because it’s decentralized? And wait, could they not just go on, for example, Solscan and track the transactions? Wow.

We’re not sure which way we’re thinking about it.

Bitcoin’s price fell below $90,000

That’s it. We just thought you might want to know after we made such a big deal about Bitcoin’s price staying below $100,000 for a weekend.

That’s a wrap

CBOE announced crypto perpetual futures, a proposal for the IRS caught attention, and Bitcoin’s price fell below $90,000. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.

Think we missed something today? Send us a note: email@meridianupdate.com.