Kalshi just posted the kind of opening week that most trading platforms dream about for their first quarter. The platform’s newly launched perpetual futures contracts blew past $1 billion in notional trading volume within seven days of going live, with more than $100 million changing hands in the first 24 hours alone.
That makes perpetual futures the fastest product launch in Kalshi’s history. And it happened in a product category that, until very recently, was entirely off-limits to US traders in any regulated capacity.
From prediction markets to perpetual futures
Here’s the backstory. Kalshi was founded in 2018 and became the first federally licensed US prediction market exchange in 2020. For years, the platform was known for event contracts, letting users bet on things like interest rate decisions, weather events, and election outcomes. Perpetual futures are a very different animal.
A perpetual future, for the uninitiated, works like a traditional futures contract but without an expiration date. Think of it as a leveraged bet on the price of an asset that you can hold indefinitely. In English: you’re speculating on where Bitcoin or Ethereum is headed, with leverage, and you don’t have to worry about your contract expiring on some arbitrary date and forcing you to roll it over.
