Kalshi plans to ask US regulators for permission to list roughly 60 perpetual futures tied to major stocks and ETFs, including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, according to the Wall Street Journal. The contracts would trade around the clock with no expiration date, bringing a product that grew up in crypto offshore markets into the heart of American equity trading. Wall Street is already pushing back.
The filing has not been made public in full, but the shape is clear from reporting and from Kalshi’s recent track record. The company got CFTC approval for a bitcoin perpetual in May, launched crypto perps under its “American Perpetuals” brand in early September with contracts on BNB, Cardano and Aave alongside bitcoin and ether, and this week launched gold and silver perps, the first non-crypto perpetuals the CFTC has ever approved. Crypto perps on the platform have done about $44 billion in notional volume since May. Stock perps are the next rung, and they are a bigger rung.
What a stock perpetual actually is
A perpetual future is a derivatives contract with no expiration. Instead of settling on a fixed date, buyers and sellers exchange funding payments that keep the contract price tethered to the underlying asset. The structure came out of crypto markets, where offshore exchanges built a product that let traders hold leveraged positions indefinitely. Volume on offshore perpetuals grew from $28 trillion in 2023 to more than $90 trillion in 2025, by Kalshi’s figures, making it one of the fastest-growing instruments ever and, until May, entirely closed to US participants.
For stocks, the pitch is simple: markets close. Nasdaq shuts at 4 pm, and nothing liquid trades Apple over the weekend. A 24/7 Apple perpetual fills that gap the way offshore crypto perps filled the gap around traditional futures. Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour made the ambition explicit in a Bloomberg interview this week, saying the company is filing for the first single-stock perpetuals in the US and looking to expand commodity perps into agriculture.
The proposed contracts would cover companies with market values of at least $100 billion, which captures the mega-cap tech names retail traders actually trade, plus major ETFs.
The regulatory problem
Here is where it gets complicated. Single-stock futures are legally “security futures” under US law, which means they need approval from both the CFTC and the SEC. Kalshi’s crypto perps needed only the CFTC. Adding the SEC to the process brings a regulator that has shown little enthusiasm for leveraged 24/7 retail products and a different statutory framework built around securities markets.
Citadel Securities has already told regulators, in a letter reported by multiple outlets, that equity-linked perpetuals should stay under SEC oversight and that a CFTC-only regime would create a “parallel market” with weaker safeguards. The firm’s concerns are specific: insider trading rules, trading halt coordination, and surveillance across two markets that would quote the same underlying stock at different hours with different rules.
Think about what a halt means in this structure. If Nvidia announces earnings guidance mid-session and the stock gets halted on Nasdaq, what happens to a perpetual tracking Nvidia that keeps trading? The funding mechanism needs a price to reference. If the underlying is frozen and the perp is not, the funding rate goes wild, and leveraged holders on both sides can get wiped out in minutes. Kalshi would need to answer that question in its filing, and the answer will involve either halting the perps too, which undermines the 24/7 pitch, or building halt procedures that do not exist today.
Insider trading is the second problem. Perpetuals trade when the stock market does not, including on weekends when material news breaks. Existing insider trading law covers securities and securities derivatives. Whether it cleanly covers a CFTC-regulated contract on a stock is a question Citadel wants answered before, not after, the first enforcement case.
The CME lawsuit hangs over everything
Kalshi’s regulatory position is not settled even for the products it already has. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange sued the company, arguing that perpetuals are not futures at all but swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act, which would subject them to stricter rules and bar retail participation. Kalshi told the CFTC in a July filing that contracts do not need a fixed expiration to qualify as futures, and that the CME’s reading “cuts directly against established precedent.”
The CFTC approved the bitcoin perp in May and gold and silver this week anyway, so the agency’s own view is at least provisionally on Kalshi’s side. But a federal court could disagree, and a loss would unwind the legal foundation for the entire product line, crypto and metals and stocks alike. Filing for equity perps while that case is pending is either confidence or a race against the docket.
There is a separate state-level fight too. New Jersey asked the Supreme Court last week to decide whether state gambling laws can apply to Kalshi’s sports-event contracts, a case that will shape how much freedom the platform has outside federal derivatives law.
What Kalshi has built so far
| Product | Launch | Regulator action | Notable figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crypto perpetuals | May 29, 2026 | CFTC approved BTCPERP | About $44B notional volume since launch |
| Altcoin perps (BNB, ADA, AAVE, WLD) | September 4, 2026 | Under CFTC regime | Up to 4.5x leverage, USD-margined |
| Gold and silver perps | September 11, 2026 | CFTC approved, first non-crypto perps | Max leverage 15.7x gold, 8.6x silver |
| Stock and ETF perps (planned) | Filing pending | Requires CFTC and SEC | About 60 contracts, $100B+ market cap names |
The company’s broader financial position supports the ambition. Kalshi raised $1.12 billion in a private equity offering toward a $1.5 billion target, on a $22 billion valuation from its May Series F. August prediction market volume hit $37.2 billion. The company has filed for copper and S&P 500-equivalent index perps as well.
Why Wall Street cares so much
The objections are not only about investor protection. Single-stock futures have existed in the US since 2002 and never took off, largely because the tax treatment was unfavorable and liquidity thin. If a 24/7 leveraged version catches on with retail traders, it pulls order flow and margin business from brokers and exchanges that currently own that activity. Citadel is the largest wholesaler of retail order flow in equities. Its letter to regulators is a business position as much as a policy one.
The CME’s lawsuit serves a similar function. Perpetuals compete with CME’s futures complex for the same risk-transfer flow. If perps are legally futures, CME can list them too, and it probably will. If they are swaps, Kalshi’s product is restricted and the threat goes away. Either outcome reshapes the market; the lawsuit is a bet on which one.
For crypto markets, the spillover is direct. The same regulatory structure Kalshi is testing for stocks would govern how crypto perps stay onshore, and the offshore $90 trillion market is the prize everyone is chasing. A court ruling that perps are swaps would hit crypto contracts first, since they launched earliest. That makes the CME case, obscure as it sounds, one of the most consequential crypto-adjacent cases of the year.
The SEC’s role is the wildcard. Chair-level signals so far suggest the agency wants market structure questions resolved through legislation, and the Clarity Act’s Senate vote is scheduled for September 15. If the bill passes with a clean CFTC-SEC division, Kalshi’s stock perps get a clearer path. If it stalls again, the company is asking two agencies to improvise in a courtroom.
Kalshi has moved fast at every step so far, from prediction markets to crypto perps to metals in under four months. The stock perp filing will test whether that speed survives contact with securities regulation, where the stakes, the adversaries and the paperwork are all an order of magnitude larger.