NextFin News - Kalshi is planning to seek regulatory approval to offer the first perpetual futures contracts tied to individual U.S. stocks - including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia - on a regulated American exchange, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would transplant a derivatives market the exchange estimates at $90 trillion in annual global volume into the U.S. regulatory perimeter and reopen a jurisdictional fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The push follows two concrete steps already taken. On September 8, 2026, KalshiEX LLC submitted a self-certification to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for GOLDPERP, a perpetual futures contract on the spot price of gold, stating in the filing that it "intends to list the Contract on September 9, 2026." The exchange then launched perpetual futures on gold and silver on Thursday, September 10 - the first non-crypto perpetual futures contracts to win regulatory clearance in the United States. A copper perpetual, COPPERPERP, was submitted for voluntary Commission review on August 18, 2026, alongside filings tied to U.S. equity indexes and currencies that remain pending.
The sequence matters. What began as a federally licensed prediction-market exchange is now assembling, product by product, a U.S. home for the world's fastest-growing derivative - and running straight into the question of which agency gets to write the rulebook for 24/7 equity-linked trading.
The Product That Refuses to Expire
Perpetual futures - "perps" in trader parlance - are cash-settled futures contracts with no fixed expiration or delivery date. Rather than converging to a deliverable cash price on a stated settlement day, a perp remains economically tethered to a continuously observed reference price through a periodic funding mechanism: at regular intervals, holders of the side trading at a premium to the reference price pay holders of the side trading at a discount, so that any divergence between the contract's mark price and the underlying spot price generates an offsetting carrying cost that draws the two back into alignment.
That definition, from Kalshi's own CFTC filing, describes an instrument that functions as an indefinitely renewing near-dated future. A participant can hold a position open for as long as the underlying exposure persists without rolling from one expiration to the next - eliminating roll cost and roll-date basis risk, and concentrating liquidity in a single continuously quoted instrument rather than fragmenting it across a curve of expirations.
The structure is no longer theoretical in the United States. Kalshi first received CFTC approval to list perpetual futures tied to cryptocurrencies in late May 2026, onshoring a product that had until then traded almost entirely on offshore, unregulated venues. The market's response was immediate: the contracts have since produced roughly $44 billion in notional volume, with trading topping $100 million in the first 24 hours and passing $1 billion in the first week.
The gold and silver perpetuals, originally filed in July, won CFTC approval this week and began trading Thursday.
"Metals, especially gold and silver, have a story to tell because of inflation," said Udesh Jha, chief risk officer at Kalshi Klear, the exchange's clearing house.
The demand is already visible in Kalshi's existing commodity-related event contracts, which have surpassed $400 million in trading volume in seven months - half the time it took its crypto event contracts to reach the same mark.
For hedgers whose economic exposure is itself continuous or indefinite - refiners and fabricators carrying work-in-process inventory, bullion banks and OTC desks carrying unallocated metal, authorized participants and market makers for gold exchange-traded products, and producers managing price exposure - the filing argues a perpetual is structurally superior to a strip of dated futures. It eliminates roll cost and roll-date basis risk, tracks spot more tightly through the funding mechanism, and concentrates liquidity in one instrument.
Why Gold, and Why the Weekend Matters
Kalshi's filing makes a pointed case for why perpetuals are especially well-suited to gold among physical commodities. Gold is the physical commodity that most closely resembles a monetary or financial asset, the filing says, and is a strong fit for the perpetual, near-continuous structure. It has relatively weak seasonality, does not spoil, and carries storage costs that are minimal relative to its value. Its above-ground stock - on the order of 200,000 tonnes - vastly exceeds annual mine production, which reached a record of approximately 3,672 tonnes in 2025, so unlike consumable agricultural or energy commodities, gold is resilient to deliverable-supply corners or squeezes.
The global gold market trades nearly around the clock during the business week across London, New York, Zurich and the major Asian centers, with the principal liquidity gap occurring only over the weekend. A cash-settled contract that never expires and stays tethered to spot through a funding mechanism therefore mirrors the economic reality of holding gold more closely than a strip of dated futures. Kalshi's contract trades continuously, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, with no daily close, no weekend close, no holiday closures and no scheduled early closes - a single uninterrupted session.
The timing also reflects competitive pressure. In June 2026, CME Group - which operates COMEX and lists the leading gold-futures contracts - announced it would extend its own cash-settled 1-Ounce Gold futures to continuous 24/7 trading; that contract has traded 24/7 on COMEX since July 24, 2026, with tens of thousands of contracts changing hands in its newly opened weekend sessions in the first weeks alone. Kalshi's gold perp is therefore not merely a product launch; it is a bid for the weekend liquidity that traditional exchanges have spent a century treating as closed.
The copper filing shows the template being standardized. COPPERPERP references the Pyth Network XCU/USD price feed, represents 1,000 pounds of copper per contract with a minimum tick of $0.0005 per pound, and trades from 6:00 PM Eastern Time on Sunday through 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Friday with a daily funding payment.
The Jurisdictional Wall: SEC, CFTC and the Citadel Letter
Here is where the expansion runs into its hardest obstacle. Kalshi has not yet filed applications for the single-stock equity perpetuals, and regulatory approval is not imminent. Each product will require case-by-case review - because the underlying stocks fall within securities markets overseen by the SEC, and because the CFTC's authority to approve perpetuals at all is itself under legal attack.
Citadel Securities sent a letter to both the SEC and the CFTC arguing that any perpetual contract linked to a public company's stock should remain under SEC oversight, not the CFTC's. The firm's reasoning centers on consistency: current SEC rules tie together surveillance across stocks, options and related markets, and Citadel warns that routing equity perpetuals through a different regulatory framework risks building a parallel market that runs on entirely different rules and different watchdogs.
The letter flags two concrete operational risks. The first is insider-trading exposure: someone holding nonpublic information about a company could, in theory, trade a perpetual contract linked to that stock while the actual stock market is closed and unable to react. The second involves trading halts. If a company releases market-moving news while its shares are halted on the exchange, a perpetual contract tracking that same stock could keep trading elsewhere without any coordinated stop, effectively pricing in news the underlying market has not been allowed to react to yet.
Separately, CME Group filed suit against the CFTC and its chairman in June, challenging the agency's approval of perpetual futures for both Kalshi and Coinbase. CME argues that perpetual contracts - which have no fixed delivery expiration date - are swaps under Dodd-Frank, not futures. That distinction carries major regulatory and tax consequences, and an adverse ruling for the CFTC could strip the legal foundation Kalshi needs to pursue equity-perpetual approvals at all.
The jurisdictional question matters well beyond one company's product roadmap. It could determine which agency writes the rulebook for an entirely new category of equity trading - one that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, outside the consolidated tape and the trading-halt regime that has governed U.S. equity markets for decades.
The Second-Order Question: Which Market Prices the News?
The obvious read of Kalshi's expansion is that demand for perps is strong and the CFTC is willing to onshore them. That is the first-order story, and much of it is already demonstrated: the $44 billion of crypto-perp notional volume and the $1 billion first-week sprint prove the demand exists. The second-order question is what happens to price discovery when the same stock can trade on two clocks.
Under the current U.S. equity structure, a stock, its options and its single-name derivatives sit under one surveillance umbrella. A material announcement triggers a trading halt; Regulation FD governs disclosure; the consolidated tape records the price at which the market cleared. A CFTC-routed single-stock perpetual would trade through the weekend, through earnings blackouts and through halts - unless the exchanges and regulators build coordination that does not yet exist.
The consequence is not merely academic. If a company leaks guidance on a Saturday, the perpetual market would price it immediately while the underlying stock sits frozen until Monday's open. The gap between the two prices becomes both an arbitrage signal and an enforcement problem. Citadel's letter is, at bottom, a warning that a parallel equity market outside SEC oversight does not just add liquidity; it fragments the mechanism by which U.S. equities are supervised.
There is also a demand-side uncertainty that the volume numbers obscure. The $90 trillion global perp figure is dominated by crypto derivatives, where traders are already accustomed to 24/7 leverage and funding-rate mechanics. Equity traders are not. Whether the appetite that produced $44 billion in crypto perps translates to single-name stock perps - where the reference asset closes at 4:00 PM Eastern and can gap on Monday - is the untested variable in Kalshi's thesis.
Cyclical or Structural: A Regime Shift, With a Cycle Riding on Top
Is this a cyclical surge in speculative appetite that will mean-revert, or a structural shift in how derivatives are intermediated? The evidence points to structural - with a cyclical overlay that investors should not confuse for the whole story.
The structural leg rests on the product itself. A perpetual future is not a marketing wrapper on an existing contract; it is a different instrument. It removes the roll decision from the hedger, eliminates roll cost and roll-date basis risk, and concentrates liquidity in one continuously quoted line. For any exposure that is itself continuous - gold inventory, a crypto holding, a macro view on copper - the perp is structurally superior to a strip of dated futures. That superiority does not depend on the price of gold or the direction of equities. It is a feature of the contract's design, and it will not self-correct away.
The structural leg also rests on the regulatory trajectory. The CFTC's approval of the BTCPERP contract in May 2026 - the first formal U.S. clearance of its kind - established a precedent. The gold and silver approvals this week extended that precedent to non-crypto commodities. The copper and equity-index filings extend it further. Each approval narrows the set of assets for which "perpetuals are not a futures product" remains a defensible position.
The cyclical leg is real but secondary. Speculative appetite for leverage expands in low-volatility, risk-seeking regimes and contracts when losses mount. Kalshi's own growth rides that cycle: annualized trading volume more than tripled from $52 billion to $178 billion over six months, institutional trading volume rose 800%, and the company closed a $1 billion Series F round at a $22 billion valuation led by Coatue - a valuation that doubled in five months from the $11 billion Series E. If volatility spikes and leveraged traders are forced out, perp volume will fall. But the contract will remain listed, and the hedgers who need continuous exposure will keep using it. The cycle rides on top of the regime; it does not define it.
The sharpest evidence that this is structural, not a fad, is who is responding. CME Group - the incumbent that stands to lose the most - did not dismiss perps as a niche product. It sued the regulator. Incumbents do not litigate against fads.
The Counter-Thesis: A Parallel Market That Should Not Exist
The strongest case against Kalshi's equity-perpetual ambition is not that demand is weak. It is that the product may be legally and operationally unworkable in the U.S. equity complex - and that the CFTC may lack the authority to approve it in the first place.
Citadel Securities, one of the largest market makers in U.S. equities and options, has formally argued that single-stock perpetuals should remain under SEC oversight. Its concern is not hypothetical: SEC rules already provide a framework for order handling, market access and trading suspensions in securities markets, protections that would not necessarily carry over if the CFTC classifies single-stock perpetuals as standard futures contracts. A parallel equity market operating under a separate rulebook, with separate surveillance and separate trading hours, would be a novel and untested regulatory architecture.
CME's lawsuit adds a second, independent threat. If a federal court agrees that perpetuals are swaps rather than futures, the CFTC's approvals - including the BTCPERP contract that anchors Kalshi's entire perp franchise - could be vacated. That would not merely delay Kalshi's equity plans; it would remove the legal predicate on which they rest.
There is also the adoption question. The $90 trillion in global perp volume is almost entirely crypto derivatives. Equity traders have spent decades trading instruments that expire, or stocks that do not. A funding-rate mechanism that charges or pays holders multiple times a day is a behavioral shift, not just a product extension. If U.S. equity participants decline to adopt the mechanic, Kalshi's stock perps could end up as a well-regulated answer to a question nobody asked.
The falsifying signal is specific. If the CFTC declines to approve the pending equity-index and copper perpetual filings within the standard review window, or if the SEC asserts jurisdiction over single-stock perpetuals and the CFTC defers, the structural-onshoring thesis is wrong - and the product stays offshore. A second falsifier: if CME's lawsuit succeeds and the BTCPERP approval is vacated, the entire franchise loses its regulatory foundation.
What to Watch
Short term (sentiment and liquidity): The gold and silver perpetuals' first weeks of volume will show whether non-crypto participants will use the structure. Watch weekend session activity - the weekend is the liquidity gap Kalshi is explicitly targeting. The COPPERPERP and equity-index filings, pending since August, are the next catalysts; their disposition will signal how the Commission views non-crypto perps.
Medium term (fundamentals and regulation): The outcome of CME's lawsuit against the CFTC is the single largest risk to the thesis. Also watch whether Citadel's letter prompts a joint SEC-CFTC statement on jurisdiction, and whether Kalshi formally files the single-stock perp applications - which would force the agencies to take a position.
Long term (structural): If the CFTC retains authority and approves equity-linked perps, the U.S. will have a 24/7 equity-derivative market operating outside the consolidated tape - a regime change for how American stocks are priced. If the SEC prevails, perps remain a crypto-and-commodity product, and the equity market's surveillance perimeter holds.
Base case: the CFTC approves the commodity and equity-index perpetuals but requires case-by-case review for single-stock products, leaving the Tesla-Apple-Nvidia lineup in limbo pending a jurisdictional settlement. Upside case: the agencies issue harmonized guidance placing equity-linked perps under a shared framework, and Kalshi launches the first regulated single-stock perp within 12 months. Downside case: CME's lawsuit succeeds or the SEC asserts jurisdiction, and single-stock perps remain offshore indefinitely.
Kalshi's expansion is a bet that the future of derivatives is continuous - no expiry, no close, no weekend. The contracts are ready. The question is whether regulators will let the same stock trade on two different clocks.
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