Kalshi stock perpetuals filing tests CFTC's contested authority

Tarek Mansour signed the paperwork on a contract type that doesn't exist yet — perpetual futures on individual stocks — and sent it to a Commission that has spent the better part of a year avoiding the harder questions about what it is allowed to approve.

The filing, which Kalshi submitted jointly with Coinbase, asks the CFTC to certify stock perpetuals as permissible event contracts under the Commodity Exchange Act. Perpetual futures have no expiration date. They settle continuously against an index price. They are the dominant instrument in offshore crypto derivatives markets, largely because U.S. exchanges were never permitted to list them. Bringing that structure to regulated equities markets is not a technical footnote. It is a jurisdictional argument wearing a product filing.

Here is where I part from the consensus read, which treats this as an ambitious but straightforward CFTC certification question. I don't think it resolves there. The SEC has never formally conceded that equity-linked derivative contracts fall cleanly within CFTC jurisdiction when the underlying is an individual stock. The jurisdictional boundary between the two agencies on single-stock derivatives has been contested since the Shad-Johnson Accord was amended in 2000. A perpetual structure — with no delivery, no expiration, and continuous mark-to-market — does not fit neatly into the single-stock futures framework that accord established. Whether the Commission can certify this without triggering an SEC objection is a genuinely open question, and I have not seen reporting that treats it as one.

The timing matters independently of the merits. The CFTC's rulemaking calendar has stalled on prediction market event contracts while state attorneys general, tribal nations, and federal courts have produced roughly six months of rulings the Commission has not formally addressed. Into that silence, Kalshi is now filing a product that would expand the Commission's jurisdiction into equity derivatives in a form no U.S. exchange has previously listed. The agency cannot process that filing in isolation from the broader authority questions it has deferred.

There is a version of this where the Commission's silence has been deliberate — where staff are working through a framework that will address prediction markets, perpetuals, and tribal preemption in a single rulemaking package. That would be the sophisticated read of Michael Selig's posture. I think it is also the optimistic one.

The legal standard that applies is 7 U.S.C. § 7a-3, which governs self-certification of new contracts by designated contract markets. Under that provision, Kalshi can certify the product if it does not violate the Act or CFTC regulations and is consistent with principles the Commission has established. The Commission then has ten business days to stay the certification. Whether a perpetual equity contract is "consistent with" a regulatory framework that has never addressed perpetual equity contracts is the sentence the certification will have to answer.