Kalshi files for single-stock perpetual futures, arriving at the same product Coinbase proposed hours earlier
The prediction market operator asked the SEC and CFTC on Friday to sign off on equity contracts with no expiry date, cleared through its own registered clearinghouse. Coinbase filed for the same product the same day, and Kraken's Bitnomial is close behind.
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Kalshi has asked US regulators to let it list perpetual futures on individual American stocks — a contract type that until now has lived almost entirely in crypto markets. The filing went to the Securities and Exchange Commission and then to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Friday, which has not yet approved the proposal.
Perpetual futures differ from ordinary futures in one central way: they carry no expiration date. Instead, periodic funding payments swap between traders holding long and short positions, nudging the contract price back toward the underlying stock. Kalshi said its contracts would be classified as security futures products and cleared through Kalshi Klear, its clearinghouse registered with the CFTC.
The timing was pointed. Coinbase lodged its own proposal for the same product that same day, meaning two of the most prominent names in US digital assets are now competing to port a crypto derivatives staple into equities. Cointelegraph reported the filings landed within hours of each other.
Kalshi is not starting from zero on the mechanics. It already runs perpetual futures on crypto assets for US customers — Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP — having won CFTC approval for its Bitcoin version in May.
A third contender is warming up
The field extends beyond the two same-day filers. Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, submitted its own application through Bitnomial Exchange, with distribution planned on the Kraken platform. Payward has said it would start with contracts tied to 10 US stocks — Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon among them — and is building toward trading five days a week, around the clock.
The regulatory backdrop makes the timing notable. On Sept. 15, the CLARITY Act failed to clear a procedural hurdle in the Senate, falling short of the 60 votes needed to advance. The next day, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the agency would "act decisively" with or without new legislation, using its existing statutory authority to give American investors and entrepreneurs regulatory certainty.
For now, the fate of all three equity perpetual proposals rests with the CFTC and the SEC, neither of which has signaled a timeline for a decision.
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