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Kalshi seeks approval for equity-index perpetual futures, expanding push into exchange turf

Kalshi filed with the CFTC to launch perpetual futures tied to equity indexes, including a US500 contract, expanding beyond prediction markets and challenging traditional exchanges.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-19 00:54

Perpetual futures, also known as "perps," are futures-style contracts with no expiration date, and traders do not need to own the underlying asset. The contracts track an asset's price continuously, with funding payments keeping the contract price aligned with the market.

According to the filing, Kalshi's "US500" perp would be tied to the MerQube U.S. Large Cap Index, which tracks the 500 largest companies listed and based in the U.S. Last month, Kalshi filed with the CFTC a proposal to launch perps on precious metals such as gold and silver. In Tuesday's filings, it also sought approval for perps tied to industrial metal copper.

Before Kalshi received regulatory approval a few months ago, perpetual futures were an asset class entirely offshore from the U.S. Kalshi said perps had over $90 trillion in global volume in 2025, and within a week of launch its own perpetual futures crossed $1 billion in notional volume, CNBC previously reported.

Stocks of exchanges such as CME Group and CBOE Global Markets fell in early June after the approval of domestic perps, on worries that the asset could create increased competition for traditional futures contracts. CME sued the CFTC in federal court over the approval.

At a June event launching its perps product, Kalshi said it wanted to be seen as a full-fledged, multi-asset financial exchange. "This is the next step towards building the largest exchange on the planet," Kalshi engineer Lior Hirschfeld said during a presentation.

Shares of traditional exchanges were higher in early trading Tuesday, with CME up 2% and CBOE rising 0.8%. CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.