Between March and September 2026, six CFTC-regulated venues in the United States entered compute in seven months. My analysis finds that the contest this market is running is over the settlement reference, not the venue. The three price administrators all six venues depend on do not measure one quantity: two publish spot rental prices on different clocks, and the third a one-year rental term. The contracts they support are not contracts on the same underlying.

Venue capacity was never the scarce input. Every one of the six venues held its CFTC designation before compute was a product category, and adding a compute contract usually costs an existing venue a self-certification filing. The regulator’s comment file on the listing of compute derivatives contracts closed on 20 October with no compute futures contract yet trading on a designated contract market. CME Group’s contracts did not launch on their announced date, and the CFTC has extended its review of them.

Index administration is the whole of the market’s revenue today, and that licensing revenue is earned by three private companies, none of which is an exchange. One administrator, Ornn, is the reference for three of the six venues, on unequal evidence. None of the six has announced an intention to settle against a reference it owns. ICE has also announced futures on a fourth reference, NATIVX’s COIL Index, which sits outside the report’s sizing.

In my reading, a company that wants to hedge what it pays for compute has to choose the index before it chooses the venue. The two spot references differ in estimator, input set and normalization, so a contract settling on one is not fungible with a contract settling on another; for the third reference that is probable but not established. The evidence that these contracts hedge anything is one simulation, of a different instrument, and the report finds that its range does not reproduce from the paper’s own inputs. The test of whether any venue settles against a reference it owns stays one of intention until a compute futures contract trades. The next decision point is 9 November, when the CFTC’s extended review of CME Group’s contracts ends.

The report sizes each stage of the value chain separately, sets out three scenarios, and profiles fourteen companies, including the six venues’ operators and the three administrators. The full analysis is on the page for the compute derivatives market report.