Kalshi's Perpetual Futures Hit $1B in Volume Within Days of Their First-Ever Launch
Kalshi's crypto perpetual futures crossed $1B in trading volume within a week of launch, the company told CNBC, after generating over $100M on their first day alone.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved KalshiEX's BTCPERP contract on May 29, making Kalshi the first company to offer regulated perpetual futures in the US.
Perps are futures contracts with no expiration date, letting traders speculate on price without owning the underlying asset.
A funding mechanism keeps contract prices aligned with the spot market, with rates on Kalshi's platform updated every eight hours.
The asset class does over $90T in annual global volume, per Bank of America, but had no regulated domestic home before now.
More than 1M people joined Kalshi's waitlist for perps at peak demand, per a company spokesperson.
The product is the fastest-growing in the company's history.
For comparison, it took Kalshi 40 months to reach $1B in volume across its event contracts.
Kalshi, which raised a $1B Series F at a $22B valuation last month, accounts for over 90% of US prediction market activity.
"This marks Kalshi's evolution from prediction market leader to next-gen derivatives exchange," said CEO Tarek Mansour.
Coinbase received CFTC approval the same day to give US traders access to global perps through Deribit, an offshore exchange Coinbase owns that is regulated in Dubai.
Kalshi said it aims to expand to over a dozen cryptocurrencies, pending further regulatory review, though perpetual futures on agricultural commodities won't be part of its offerings.
Not Everyone Is Cheering
The enthusiasm has rattled shareholders of established derivatives exchanges.
Shares of CME Group and Cboe Global Markets were on track for a third straight weekly decline after the perps launch, per FactSet data.
Terry Duffy, chair and CEO of CME Group, said perps encourage reckless speculation and offer little utility for anyone hedging a commodity price.
"I don't want casinos in exchanges. I want to have products that people need to trade," Duffy said.
He also flagged perps' auto-liquidation mechanism as a potential trigger for cascading losses if margin requirements are breached.
Cboe took a cooler stance, saying options and futures are fundamentally different products and that options have been steadily taking market share from futures over time.
David Nadig, president of ETF.com, offered a blunter read in comments to MarketWatch: "For yolo hedge funds and degen day traders, perps are just a better mousetrap."
The same volume milestone that perps hit in seven days took Kalshi's event contracts more than three years to reach.
