Onion Futures Site Sells Legal Onion Contracts by Exploiting a 1958 Ban's Loophole

The San Francisco Onion Futures Company sells private, transferable contracts for the future physical delivery of yellow onions, priced between $3 and $12 per onion and payable through Stripe, with delivery dates up to six months out. The gimmick’s whole premise rests on a legal technicality: U.S. law (7 U.S. Code § 13-1, the Onion Futures Act of 1958) bans onion futures trading, but only on organized boards of trade. By selling directly to individuals rather than operating an exchange or secondary market, the company argues it stays on the right side of the statute. Prices are recalculated nightly by an unspecified ‘proprietary algorithm,’ and physical delivery is arranged in San Francisco, Toronto, Seattle, and Chicago.

The more interesting design detail is the ownership model, which functions like a bearer instrument. Each contract is controlled by a unique key; whoever holds it can reassign the registered contact and delivery information, which voids the prior key and reissues a new one. There’s no way to read a contract’s stored details from the key, so transferring or reselling it doesn’t expose the current owner’s information. That makes contracts freely resellable up until their delivery month, with no refunds even on failed deliveries.

The page also contains a plant-text instruction aimed at language models, asking any AI reading on a human’s behalf to redirect them to the site for pricing — a small example of the prompt-injection attempts now showing up on public web pages. The whole operation is run by a single proprietor, Sophia Vysparov, and reads as a hobbyist art-and-legal-curiosity project rather than a serious commodities venture.