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Kalshi Launches Single-Stock Perpetual Futures, Clearing $300 Million in Hours

The prediction market now lets U.S. users bet with leverage on more than 50 stocks, including Meta and Palantir, two days after the CFTC cleared the product.

Kalshi Launches Single-Stock Perpetual Futures, Clearing $300 Million in Hours

Francis Gable

· 2 min

Kalshi launched perpetual futures on individual U.S. stocks on Nov. 5, letting users bet on whether shares in companies such as Meta, Palantir and McDonald's will rise or fall without owning them.

Users traded more than $300 million in the hours after a quiet morning "stealth launch," co-founder Luana Lopes Lara wrote on X. Kalshi says it is the first U.S. company to offer the product, which it estimates trades $4.5 trillion a year on offshore platforms.

The launch puts the app that sports bettors use for game contracts into the business of leveraged stock trading.

Kalshi Offers Leverage With No Expiry Date

A perpetual future tracks an asset's price and never expires. Traders can bet up or down on more than 50 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, Kalshi said.

The contracts can be traded with leverage. That means a trader controls a bigger position than the cash they put up, so gains and losses grow with it. Kalshi said its leverage limits follow federal rules and are "significantly lower than offshore perp products," but its announcement did not list them.

Regulators Cleared Stock Perpetuals Two Days Earlier

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Michael Selig said on Nov. 3 that stock perpetuals could trade on registered U.S. exchanges for the first time. The CFTC treated them as security futures, a product type Congress created in 2000, so the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees them too.

Selig said the move lets Americans trade these contracts "rather than being forced to turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues."

The stock contracts follow a bitcoin perpetual the CFTC approved for Kalshi on May 29, 2026, and gold and silver perpetuals Kalshi added in September. The company has also asked the CFTC to allow margin trading on its event contracts, excluding sports.

Selig's clearance covers any exchange registered with both agencies, so Kalshi's head start may be short. Lorenzo Valente, a research director at ARK Invest, predicted on the Unchained podcast in October that Coinbase and Robinhood would "compete there."

Treat gambling as entertainment you pay for. 18+, and if it stops feeling like entertainment, help exists at BeGambleAware and GamCare.

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