Kalshi launches U.S.-regulated perpetual futures on individual stocks

Kalshi has launched regulated perpetual futures tied to individual U.S. stocks, allowing its traders to take long or short positions on price movements in more than 50 large companies. The contracts, available from Nov. 5, cover names including McDonald’s, Palantir, SpaceX and Meta, and Kalshi says it is the first company to offer the product in the United States.

The launch puts a product previously traded on offshore platforms onto a U.S. exchange subject to joint Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission oversight. Kalshi says single-stock perpetuals already account for more than $4.5 trillion of annual transactions, though that activity had taken place outside the U.S. regulatory perimeter.

As we reported Oct. 7, Kalshi had already opened a perpetual future tied to a U.S. large-cap equity index for Kalshi Prime clients. The company had previously rolled out crypto perpetual futures in May and gold and silver contracts in September.

A perpetual future is a cash-settled contract without a fixed expiry or delivery date. It remains linked to the underlying stock through funding payments: under Kalshi’s structure, the side trading at a premium to the reference price pays the side trading at a discount. Positions can remain open until offset, rather than requiring a trader to roll from one contract maturity to another.

Kalshi’s Sept. 18 filing with the CFTC covered 58 proposed contracts, including 55 on the common stock of individual issuers and three on American depositary receipts or exchange-traded fund shares. Each contract unit represents 100 shares, with no physical delivery. Customer margin must be at least 15.5% of a position’s market value.

The proposed contracts trade from 6 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to 5 p.m. Friday, with a daily maintenance break from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. The exchange’s proposed listing standards require qualifying underlying securities to have at least 20 million shares of estimated deliverable supply, a market capitalisation of at least $100 billion and average daily transaction value of at least $450 million over the previous six months, subject to an exception for newer listings.

Kalshi says its products use lower leverage than offshore perpetuals and charge a transparent trading fee rather than rely on payment for order flow. It has presented the contracts as allowing short positions without a special brokerage account, custody arrangement or borrow fees, and said they avoid the strike prices, Greeks and time decay associated with options.

The rollout comes amid a legal challenge to the regulatory basis for the contracts. On Nov. 3, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan denied the Capital Markets Alliance Association’s request for a temporary restraining order against approvals involving Kalshi, Bitnomial Exchange and Coinbase Derivatives because the group had not shown likely irreparable harm.

But Judge Caproni wrote that the association was likely to succeed in its argument that the CFTC lacked statutory authority to permit retail single-stock perpetuals, finding the contracts did not appear to meet the definition of a security future because they did not provide for sale for future delivery of a single security. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said the contracts had been deemed approved as security futures products under the agency’s rules. The alliance’s reply in the preliminary-injunction case is due Nov. 10.