Kalshi Stock Perps Top $300M Hours After U.S. Debut

Kalshi said Thursday it launched regulated single-stock perpetual futures in the United States, and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara wrote that users had already traded more than $300 million since a morning stealth rollout, the company's announcement said. That tally landed before the press release did.

The CFTC-regulated prediction market said traders can take positions on more than 50 NYSE- and Nasdaq-listed companies, including McDonald's, Palantir, Meta and SpaceX, without owning the shares.

The product went live two days after the green light.

What the CFTC cleared

On Nov. 3, CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said perpetual futures on individual equities can begin trading on CFTC-registered exchanges that are also notice-registered with the SEC for security futures, in a statement. He said the contracts were deemed approved under Commission Regulation 40.3 as security futures under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, putting them under joint CFTC and SEC rules.

Selig wrote that U.S. traders should be able to use such products "rather than being forced to turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues."

How a stock perp works

A perpetual future tracks an asset's price with no expiry date. Traders go long or short and settle funding payments instead of rolling a dated contract. Kalshi says its versions carry no rollover fees, skip options-style strikes and time decay, and set leverage under CFTC rules at levels "significantly lower than offshore perp products." It charges a trading fee and says it does not use payment for order flow.

Kalshi puts annual trading in single-stock perps above $4.5 trillion worldwide, all of it offshore until now, by its own account. The company earlier launched bitcoin perps in May and gold and silver perps in September, its post says.

Crypto Briefing separately reported the $300 million figure and said each Kalshi stock contract represents 0.02 shares, with daily funding settled at 4 p.m. ET.

In our opinion: $300 million before the press release is a loud open for an onshore product. The next checkable piece is whether volume holds once the stealth window ends, and how Selig's Nov. 3 security-futures frame holds up if rivals and courts press it.