Polymarket Launches Perpetuals With Up to 20x Leverage

Highlights

Polymarket has launched perpetual contracts offering up to 20x leverage with no expiration date.
The service began with 10 markets and expanded to 67 within hours, spanning crypto, equities, indices and commodities.
Initial listings include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, gold, silver, WTI oil, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and single-stock contracts tied to names like Tesla, Nvidia and SpaceX.
The product is live only for international users; American Polymarket users are excluded entirely.

Polymarket, the prediction-market platform best known for letting users bet on binary outcomes like elections and sports results, has expanded into an entirely different kind of product: leveraged perpetual futures. The new offering, branded Polymarket Perps, went live allowing traders to take long or short positions with up to 20x leverage and no contract expiration, a structure that puts it in direct competition with dedicated derivatives exchanges rather than other prediction markets.

The rollout moved fast. Polymarket Perps launched with an initial slate of just 10 markets, then expanded to 67 within hours as the platform added more underlying assets to the lineup. The starting list covered the most heavily traded crypto assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and HYPE, alongside traditional-market benchmarks including gold, silver, WTI crude oil, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100. Individual equity perpetuals were also included from the outset, with contracts tracking single stocks such as Tesla and Nvidia, plus a market tied to SpaceX shares — a name that trades nowhere on public equity markets, giving crypto-native traders synthetic exposure to a company they otherwise cannot access.

How the Contracts Are Structured

A perpetual contract tracks the price of its underlying asset continuously and never expires, distinguishing it from traditional futures that settle on a fixed date. To keep the contract's price anchored to the spot price of whatever it references, Polymarket's perps use a funding-rate mechanism: periodic payments flow between long and short position holders roughly every hour, with the direction and size of the payment determined by how far the perpetual's price has drifted from the underlying spot or index price. This is the same basic mechanism used by dedicated perpetual exchanges like Hyperliquid and dYdX, and its adoption by Polymarket signals the platform sees more revenue potential in leveraged trading fees than in incremental growth of its original event-contract business.

Why Polymarket Is Moving Into Derivatives

The move reflects a broader pattern across the prediction-market and DeFi derivatives space in 2026, where platforms that started with a narrow product have raced to add leveraged trading once user bases matured, following a similar trajectory to how Hyperliquid has kept expanding its own market structure under its HIP-3 upgrade. Perpetuals carry structurally higher fee potential per dollar of volume than binary prediction contracts, since leveraged positions generate ongoing funding payments and higher turnover than a single election-night bet that settles once and closes out. Bringing traditional assets like gold, oil and single stocks onto the same platform as crypto also positions Polymarket to capture traders who want cross-asset exposure without moving capital between separate venues, a convenience that has fueled growth at rival platforms such as on-chain perpetual venues now posting record open interest.

What to Watch Next

The most consequential detail in the launch is who cannot use it: American users are excluded entirely, consistent with Polymarket's long-running regulatory posture toward US retail access following its past disputes with the CFTC. Whether that restriction holds as the product scales, or whether Polymarket eventually pursues a licensed US pathway similar to peers pursuing regulated derivatives access, will shape how much of the platform's growth actually reaches its largest potential market. In the near term, watch whether the 67-market lineup keeps expanding at the same pace and whether trading volume on the new perpetuals rivals the platform's existing prediction-market flow.

FAQ

What leverage does Polymarket Perps offer?
Up to 20x leverage on supported contracts, with no expiration date on the positions.

What assets can be traded on Polymarket Perps?
The platform launched with 10 markets and expanded to 67 within hours, covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, HYPE, gold, silver, WTI oil, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, and single-stock contracts including Tesla, Nvidia and SpaceX.

Can US users access Polymarket Perps?
No. The product is currently available only to international users legally permitted to use it; American Polymarket users are excluded.

How do the perpetual contracts stay tied to the underlying asset's price?
A funding-rate mechanism moves payments between long and short position holders roughly every hour to keep the contract price anchored to spot.