Kalshi, the platform most known for letting you bet on whether it’ll snow on Christmas, just pulled off something considerably more ambitious. The New York-based exchange has racked up $5.5 billion in trading volume on its perpetual futures contracts in just two weeks, and now it’s looking to expand the business well beyond digital assets.
That’s a remarkable pace for a product category that didn’t exist in the regulated US market until Kalshi launched it on May 29. The platform debuted the first CFTC-regulated perpetual futures contracts in American history, starting with Bitcoin, and the market responded with the subtlety of a fire hose.
From prediction markets to derivatives heavyweight
Here’s the thing about perpetual futures: they never expire. Unlike traditional futures contracts that settle on a specific date, perps let traders hold leveraged positions indefinitely, paying or receiving periodic funding rates to keep the contract price tethered to the underlying asset.
Offshore perpetual trading volumes ballooned from $28 trillion in 2023 to over $90 trillion in 2025. That’s not a typo. Ninety trillion dollars worth of perpetual futures changed hands on unregulated offshore exchanges in a single year.
