Highlights

  • Kalshi plans to seek regulatory approval for perpetual futures tied to individual stocks including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia.
  • Kalshi became the first US platform to offer CFTC-regulated perpetual futures with its bitcoin contract in late May.
  • Its crypto perpetuals have already generated $44 billion in notional volume since launch.
  • A pending CME lawsuit against the CFTC over how Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual is classified remains unresolved.

Kalshi is preparing to seek regulatory approval to offer perpetual futures linked to individual stocks such as Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, extending a product line that has rapidly expanded since the platform won first-in-the-nation clearance for a bitcoin perpetual contract. The CFTC approved that original bitcoin perpetual in late May, making Kalshi the first US platform authorized to offer regulated perpetual futures domestically. Since then, the company has moved quickly: on September 4 it launched five additional crypto perpetual contracts covering BNB, Cardano, Worldcoin, Aave and Venice Token, and on September 9 it filed to add gold and silver perpetuals through the CFTC's Regulation 40.2(a) self-certification process, which lets registered platforms list new products without waiting for a full commission approval vote.

That self-certification path is significant context for the stock perpetuals plan: rather than petitioning the CFTC for a new product approval and waiting on a formal review, Kalshi has increasingly relied on the faster self-certification route to expand its lineup. Since the bitcoin contract launched, the company says its crypto perpetuals alone have generated $44 billion in notional trading volume, a figure that underscores why Kalshi is moving aggressively to extend the same wrapper to equities rather than treating crypto as a one-off pilot. Individual stock perpetuals would be a meaningfully bigger step than gold, silver or altcoin contracts, since equities carry their own dense web of existing derivatives markets, insider-trading surveillance requirements and exchange listing agreements that a self-certified perpetual product would need to coexist with rather than replace.

The expansion is happening while a legal challenge to the underlying product category remains unresolved. CME Group sued the CFTC in federal court in Washington, D.C. in June, arguing the regulator was wrong to treat Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual as a futures contract rather than a swap, a classification fight with real regulatory consequences since swaps and futures fall under different oversight regimes. Decrypt reported that the CFTC has since asked the court to dismiss CME's lawsuit, arguing CME hasn't shown the kind of concrete injury needed to establish legal standing to sue in the first place. No ruling has landed yet, meaning Kalshi is pushing into new asset classes — gold, silver, and now potentially single stocks — while the legal foundation for its flagship perpetual product is still being contested in court.

Competing for the Same Trading Volume as Traditional Venues

Kalshi isn't the only platform racing to bring perpetual-style stock exposure to US-adjacent markets. Coinbase has already launched stock perpetual futures for eligible non-US users, offering leveraged synthetic exposure of up to 10x on Tesla, Apple, Nvidia and other large-cap technology names. That kind of overlap sets up direct competition between crypto-native platforms and traditional derivatives venues for the same underlying trading activity, at a moment when Kalshi's commodity markets have already begun outpacing its own crypto volume on a monthly basis. Stock perpetuals would give Kalshi a third major vertical alongside crypto and commodities, all built on the same regulatory approach the CME lawsuit is currently trying to unwind.

What Comes Next

The near-term path runs through the courts before it runs through any new stock listing: a ruling on CME's standing to sue, or on the underlying futures-versus-swap classification question, would materially change how confident Kalshi can be in using self-certification to launch products as consequential as single-stock perpetuals. Separately, prediction-market volumes across the sector have been choppy — combined Kalshi and Polymarket volume actually fell in August, the category's first monthly drop in a year — so whether stock perpetuals can reverse that trend or simply cannibalize existing crypto and commodity activity is a question the company will need to answer once the product is live.

FAQ

What is Kalshi planning to launch?
Regulated perpetual futures tied to individual stocks such as Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, extending the same product structure it already uses for bitcoin, gold and silver.

How did Kalshi get bitcoin perpetual futures approved?
The CFTC approved Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual contract in late May, making it the first CFTC-regulated perpetual futures product offered domestically in the US.

What is the CME lawsuit about?
CME Group sued the CFTC in June, arguing Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual should be classified as a swap rather than a futures contract; the CFTC has asked the court to dismiss the case, and no ruling has been issued.

How much volume have Kalshi's crypto perpetuals done?
The company says its crypto perpetual contracts have generated $44 billion in notional trading volume since the bitcoin contract launched in late May.