Kalshi files to list single-stock perpetual futures on US exchange

Kalshi has applied to list perpetual futures contracts on individual equities — Tesla, Apple, and Nvidia among roughly sixty names — a move that would make it the first US-regulated exchange to offer the product to retail customers.

Perpetual futures are not new. They have been the dominant instrument in offshore crypto trading for years, precisely because they carry no expiry date and no delivery obligation. What Kalshi is attempting is to bring that structure onshore, regulated, and applied to single stocks rather than tokens. That is a materially different thing from anything currently permitted on a US exchange, and the distance between "Kalshi files for this" and "Kalshi lists this" is not short.

The filing itself is the news, though, and it deserves more attention than it has received. The prediction markets conversation has been dominated for months by the sports contract question — the CFTC's statutory limits, the state enforcement actions, the Supreme Court petitions stacking up. Meanwhile Kalshi has been building product surface area in a direction that the sports debate mostly obscures. NFL volume crossing a billion dollars is a headline. A perpetual futures filing on sixty equity names is a structural expansion of what a prediction market exchange is allowed to be.

I have watched regulated exchanges attempt product category jumps before, and the variable that usually determines whether the filing dies quietly or becomes a listed product is not the regulator's view of the instrument — it is whether the regulator has a clear statutory basis to say no. With perpetual futures on equities, the CFTC's position is genuinely unsettled. These are not prediction market event contracts, which sit in one part of the Commodity Exchange Act. They are closer to swaps or futures, which sit somewhere else, with different rules about who can access them and how they must be margined. Kalshi will have a legal theory for why retail access is permissible. The Commission will have questions about that theory that will take time to resolve.

The equity names matter too. Tesla, Apple, Nvidia are not chosen arbitrarily. They are the three most-traded names in retail brokerage, the stocks that retail customers already think they understand. Kalshi is not trying to create a new market from nothing — it is trying to give existing retail demand a new instrument. Whether that framing survives CFTC scrutiny depends on whether the Commission reads the filing as financial innovation or as regulatory arbitrage on margin rules.

The prediction markets that currently exist on Kalshi resolve to yes or no. A perpetual future never resolves — it just marks to market continuously, and the funding rate between long and short holders does the clearing. That is a fundamentally different risk profile for a retail customer, and it is the thing the CFTC will look at hardest.

I think this filing moves forward, slowly, with modifications. The Commission has shown under its current leadership that it is willing to entertain product expansion on regulated venues. But the modifications Kalshi will need to accept — on margin requirements, on retail access thresholds, on the funding rate mechanics — will determine whether what eventually lists resembles what was filed. Kalshi reaches $983 million in NFL volume and simultaneously files for single-stock perpetuals in the same news cycle. The sports contract fight is the visible war. This is the terrain being acquired while everyone is watching the front.