The United States Securities and Exchange Commission granted accelerated approval on October 13, 2026 to a Cboe Exchange proposal to list binary options tied to reported business metrics of 23 public companies, according to The Crypto Times on October 15, 2026, citing the SEC approval order, Release No. 34-106659. Investor's Business Daily reported on October 15, 2026 that the approval boosts the prediction market offerings of both Cboe and Robinhood, which aims to be the first retail broker to offer the contracts.
The mechanics are deliberately narrow. The contracts are cash settled, European style options that can only be exercised at expiration, and they trade as national market system securities, according to The Crypto Times summary of the SEC order. A call pays a fixed 1 dollar if the reported metric equals or exceeds a preset strike level and a put pays 1 dollar if it falls below that level, and in all other cases the contract expires worthless, The Crypto Times reported. Settlement uses the figure in the company's SEC filing, not its earnings press release, and a later restatement does not change a payout already settled, according to The Crypto Times.
Position limits show how small the product starts. Each contract has a multiplier of one, compared with 100 for standard equity options, positions must be fully funded, and holdings are capped at 25,000 standard option contracts per expiration, with 100 binary KPI contracts counting as one standard contract, according to The Crypto Times. Cboe filed the proposal on June 30, 2026, the Federal Register published it for comment on July 15, 2026, and Cboe submitted a revised version on October 1, 2026 before the October 13 approval, The Crypto Times reported, citing the order.
The metric list reaches directly into crypto and fintech. For Coinbase Global, the approved metrics include diluted earnings per share, total revenue, transaction revenue, total trading volume, and subscription and services revenue, according to The Crypto Times. For MARA Holdings, listed in the order under its former name Marathon Digital Holdings, they include bitcoin produced, bitcoin purchased, total bitcoin holdings, blocks won and energized hashrate, and for Robinhood Markets they include total net revenues, funded customers, average revenue per user and Robinhood Gold subscribers, The Crypto Times reported. Cboe's Day 1 product list dated September 14, 2026 showed more than 100 metrics planned, and that list did not include Coinbase total trading volume among the initial contracts, The Crypto Times added.
SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins issued a statement the same day as the approval, according to The Crypto Times. Atkins said the contracts will follow exchange rules on margin requirements, trading halts and market maker quoting obligations, and he stressed that the order covers only these specific contracts traded on a securities exchange and neither addresses nor forecloses Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversight of KPI products structured differently, The Crypto Times reported. Atkins described years of jurisdictional turf wars between the two agencies and called the decision a sign of 'a new spirit of harmonization, innovation, and investor choice,' in the statement cited by The Crypto Times and CoinDesk on October 16, 2026.
Approval is not a launch date. Cboe and Robinhood announced the planned contracts on September 30, 2026 at Robinhood's HOOD Summit in Houston, expecting an October launch subject to regulatory approval, with Robinhood as the first retail broker and both companies waiving fees on the contracts through the end of 2026, according to The Crypto Times and Investor's Business Daily. CoinDesk reported on October 16, 2026 that trading cannot begin until Cboe Clear U.S., the clearing house, receives provisional registration, with a separate application still pending, and The Crypto Times reported that a Cboe trading notice makes listing subject to approval of filings by both the exchange and Cboe Clear U.S., with no trading date announced as of October 15, 2026.
Kalshi opposed the path Cboe took. Kalshi, a CFTC regulated prediction market, urged the SEC to hold off until regulators clarified where SEC authority over securities ends and CFTC authority over derivatives begins, according to The Crypto Times, which noted Kalshi's August 5, 2026 comment letter is posted on the SEC public docket for the proposal. The KPI options extend Cboe's own push into outcome based trading: in June 2026 Cboe launched Cboe Predicts, a suite of binary options on the Mini S and P 500 Index, initially through Interactive Brokers, according to The Crypto Times.
Analysis: this approval builds a prediction style product inside securities law instead of event contract law, and that jurisdictional choice is the story. Kalshi has spent two years arguing in court that outcome contracts on a CFTC venue are federal derivatives, while Cboe now has an SEC approved, exchange listed version of a yes or no outcome contract whose underlying is a company's own reported numbers, settled from SEC filings rather than from an event result feed. What to watch is the clearing gate first, because without Cboe Clear U.S. registration there is no trading at all, then the final Day 1 metric list, whether Robinhood distribution gives these contracts retail volume that Kalshi's KPI markets have not shown, and whether Kalshi or the CFTC challenges the boundary Atkins deliberately left open for differently structured products. If the contracts launch in October as planned, the competitive fight between securities options and event contracts stops being theoretical.