Kalshi made its name on election and sports bets.
Now it wants a piece of one of crypto's biggest trading games. And it just got the green light to try.
Kalshi is best known for event contracts. People trade there on real-world outcomes. Now it's stepping into full-time price bets.
Kalshi said Friday it will roll out perpetual futures. The first one is a Bitcoin contract, and regulators just cleared it. Perpetual futures - or "perps" - track an asset's price with no end date.
Normal futures expire. That forces traders to keep rolling into new ones. Perps never end. Small payments every eight hours keep the perp's price tied to the real one.
Think of a gym pass that never lapses, not a day pass you keep rebuying. You can hold the spot as long as you like. A fund that owns Bitcoin can also use a perp to hedge. To hedge means to guard against a price drop.
A trader who just wants a bet can use one too. There's no expiration date to manage. That ease is a big reason perps caught on. It's also why offshore venues built such a lead.
These contracts trade around the clock. Crypto never closes, and now neither does this. That always-on style is new for U.S. markets.
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Perps are huge. Offshore venues ran more than $90 trillion in volume in 2025. That's up from $28 trillion in 2023. The market more than tripled in two years.
Most of that was off-limits to U.S. traders. They had to go through offshore sites to get in. Many big funds simply stayed out. A legal U.S. version gives them a way in.
Kalshi's edge is the rules. Its perps fall under the CFTC, the U.S. agency that polices futures. Funding gets charged every eight hours. It also shows up in your history. Kalshi says that kind of clarity is rare offshore.
Kalshi isn't alone here. Rival Polymarket is also moving into round-the-clock trading. Both want more than one-off event bets. They want full-time markets. Regulators have weighed all of this in their wider look at prediction markets.
The CFTC's new chair has pushed to bring perps onshore. That stance opened the door for Kalshi. Coinbase got a similar nod on the same day. So the race to host U.S. perps is already on.
Kalshi said farm perps won't be in the lineup. It plans to add more than a dozen coins as new CFTC approvals come through. The first contract tracks Bitcoin. More coins should follow over time, but each one needs its own sign-off.
A legal U.S. home for perps could pull a giant offshore market onshore. The next approvals will show how fast that shift moves.
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