Overview
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Kalshi’s first perpetual contract on May 29, and the exchange launched a sequence of cash‑settled, no‑expiry perpetuals in early June that recorded more than $100 million in the first 24 hours and over $1 billion in notional volume within a week.
- Kalshi has listed Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink, XRP and Solana perps and has filed additional contracts for tokens such as Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Stellar and Hedera that are awaiting CFTC clearance.
- The products trade 24/7, use regulated price references from CME CF and CF Benchmarks, clear through Kalshi Klear, and impose lower leverage and caps on funding rates compared with typical offshore perpetual venues.
- Industry voices and some exchanges have warned that offering perpetuals onshore can expose retail traders to leverage and automatic‑liquidation risk and could strain clearing, surveillance and risk models built for dated futures.
- For U.S. investors this creates a regulated on‑ramp to a market that has long been dominated offshore and could shift flows to domestic venues, but the CFTC’s case‑by‑case approval path means policy or supervisory changes could still reshape the market.