The product was born in crypto and is now heading for the stock market. Kalshi, the prediction market operator, plans to ask US regulators for permission to list perpetual contracts tied to individual stocks, people familiar with the matter said, weeks after Coinbase filed a similar application.
Perpetual contracts, or perps, are the core derivative of crypto markets, letting traders bet on price moves without an expiry date. Moving them onto single stocks would pair crypto’s most popular product design with traditional securities, a combination that US regulators have not yet clearly ruled on.
The format took over crypto in under a decade. BitMEX introduced the perpetual swap in 2016 as a futures contract with no expiry and a funding rate that keeps the contract price tethered to the underlying, and it quickly became the most traded product in digital assets. Crypto exchanges now process the bulk of their volume in perpetuals, which is why moving the design onto equities would pair the most liquid derivative ever built for crypto with the deepest capital market in the world.
Kalshi is not starting from zero. The company recently won approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to list perpetual products for gold and silver, the first commodities of their kind under the agency’s supervision. Single-stock contracts would extend that beachhead from metals to equities.
The regulatory ambiguity is exactly why both companies are moving now. The CFTC has authority over some derivatives and the Securities and Exchange Commission over others, and the line between the two has not been drawn for crypto-style perpetuals on stocks. Filing early is a way to shape the question and lock in a position before rules harden.
The turf question has a history. Single-stock futures have existed in the United States since 2002, when the OneChicago exchange began listing them under joint CFTC and SEC oversight, and the product never took off the way its backers hoped. Perpetual contracts add a new twist: they have no expiry, and the CFTC only formalized its thinking on them with a request for comment in May 2025. Whether a crypto-style perpetual on a single stock is a future, a swap, or something new is precisely what neither agency has yet settled.
Kalshi built its name on prediction markets. It fought a long legal battle to list contracts on election outcomes and eventually won, establishing that event-based markets could operate under CFTC oversight. That victory gave the company a template for pushing into new contract types and a record of winning in court.
Kalshi’s path to this point ran through the courts. The company, founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, fought the CFTC for years over election-outcome contracts, and a federal appeals court ruled in October 2024 that the agency had overreached in blocking them. The CFTC dropped its appeal in May 2025, and Kalshi went on to list political contracts that drew heavy trading around the 2024 and 2026 elections. That record of beating the regulator is the template Kalshi is now applying to single-stock products.
Coinbase’s application, filed last week, raises the stakes. The exchange has been expanding its derivatives arm and has argued that perpetual futures are simply an efficient way to trade price exposure. If either company wins approval, the other will be expected to follow quickly, and the product could spread across retail platforms.
Coinbase is further along on the crypto side. Its derivatives unit launched CFTC-regulated perpetual futures for US retail customers in July 2025, and this month it filed paperwork with the SEC to register as a security-futures exchange and broker for single-stock products. Coinbase has spent years building a derivatives arm, including the 2022 purchase of the FairX exchange, and has argued that perpetuals are simply a cheaper, more efficient way to hold price exposure. If the SEC and CFTC coordinate on the product, Coinbase and Kalshi would likely be the first two listings.
The appetite for the product is real on both sides. Crypto traders have shown they prefer perpetuals to dated futures by a wide margin, and retail stock traders have migrated toward products that offer around-the-clock, leveraged exposure. The question regulators will weigh is whether that demand, applied to single companies, creates risks that the equity markets’ settlement and surveillance rules were built to prevent.
Analysts said the economics are attractive to both. Perpetuals generate steady trading volume and are the most liquid instruments in crypto, and applying the format to stocks could bring continuous, leveraged trading to a much larger underlying market.
The risks are equally clear. Stock trading is heavily regulated, and leveraged products tied to individual companies raise questions about manipulation, settlement, and investor protection that regulators have spent decades answering for equities. The crypto experience does not translate automatically.
Kalshi has not disclosed a timeline, and approvals of this kind take time. But the company has shown it will litigate to get products listed, and Coinbase’s entry means the race is now visible. Whoever gets there first will define the terms for a product that sits precisely on the fault line between two regulatory regimes.
