Prediction Market Giants Kalshi, Polymarket Eye Perpetual Futures Push: Report

Polymarket announced on Tuesday that users will soon be able to trade perpetual futures on its platform, while chief rival Kalshi reportedly eyes a similar push into the derivatives space.

In an X post, Polymarket published a video indicating that users will be able to speculate on the price of various assets with at least 10x leverage, including real-world assets like gold and silver, stocks of companies like Nvidia and Coinbase, and digital assets like Bitcoin. 

Not long before, The Information reported that Kalshi plans to support perpetual futures on its platform, a move that would give U.S. customers access to derivative contracts that don’t feature an expiration date and use a so-called funding rate to trade around the clock.

For the prediction-market realm’s leading firms, an entry into the perpetual futures space would extend the platforms’ functionality beyond relatively basic bets on topics such as politics, finance, and sports—underscoring their respective efforts to expand their business models.

Polymarket and Kalshi are already able to provide access to futures and options under the CFTC’s framework for so-called Designated Contract Markets. It is unclear whether Polymarket plans to introduce perpetual futures on its U.S.-facing platform, its international counterpart, or both.

Decrypt has reached out to Kalshi and Polymarket for comment.

The development comes as CME Group, the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, aligns itself with other players soliciting bets. Earlier this year, CME Group indicated that it would debut event contracts in collaboration with FanDuel, America’s leading online sportsbook.

Recent interest in perpetual futures has been fueled by Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that facilitated $148 billion in derivatives volume last month, according to a Dune dashboard.

In February, Hyperliquid said in an X post that it planned to support “outcome trading,” which would allow for the creation of prediction markets and option-like instruments on its platform. “There has been extensive user demand in both of these areas,” Hyperliquid said.

Among crypto-native firms, dueling derivatives announcements have happened before. A week after crypto exchange Kraken debuted CME-based futures contracts for Bitcoin and Ethereum in the U.S. last July, Coinbase began offering similar contracts with five-year durations.

On Tuesday, Coinbase found itself on the defensive amid its own prediction-market push alongside Gemini. The state of New York filed a pair of lawsuits against both firms, arguing that sports- and entertainment-related wagers were allowed in violation of local gambling laws.