The contract has no expiry and uses funding payments between longs and shorts to track an index Kalshi calls the US 500. The exchange filed it with the CFTC in August, the reports disagree on what the agency then did, and its separate filings for perpetuals on single stocks are not trading.
Kalshi listed a perpetual future on Tuesday that references an index of 500 large US companies the exchange calls the US 500, taking the venue beyond the binary event contracts it built its business on.
The contract has no expiration date. Traders take leveraged long or short positions, and the exchange applies periodic funding payments between longs and shorts to hold the contract near the index level. It settles in cash, and there is no later contract month to roll a position into.
"Stock market exposure is the next step towards Kalshi becoming a full-service financial exchange, and perps are the best way for our traders to get this exposure," chief executive Tarek Mansour said in a quote carried by Crypto Briefing. Kalshi separately told Reuters that the contract is part of a push to compete with traditional brokerage offerings, Prediction News reported.
The payoff is a different shape from the rest of Kalshi's book. An event contract settles at one of two values, so a trader's maximum gain is fixed the moment the position is opened. A perpetual future pays in proportion to how far the index moves, and a leveraged position in one can be closed out against the trader before the index comes back. Funding is a running cost or a running credit depending on which side of the trade the rate favors, which an event contract does not have.
The specifications a trader would need to price the contract are not in any of the launch reports. None gives a maximum leverage, an initial or maintenance margin requirement, a funding interval, or a cap on the funding rate. None says who is eligible to trade it either, so whether US retail customers have access is not established here.
Kalshi filed the contract with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in August. What the agency did next is where the reports part company. One describes a filing awaiting the regulator, another says the approval status is unclear, and a third calls the contract approved. The Commission's filings docket could not be opened for this article, so the disposition is unresolved. A filing is not an approval, and nothing read here establishes an order.
The contrast with perpetuals on single stocks is the sharper point. Coinbase Derivatives filed to list perpetual futures on individual US stocks on September 18 as security futures under Rule 41.23(b), the category the SEC and the CFTC oversee jointly, and the docket showed that filing as approval pending. DeFi Rate reports that Kalshi has also filed proposed rules for perpetuals on individual stocks and exchange-traded funds, naming Apple, Nvidia and SPY, and does not describe those as trading. The contract that reached traders is the one written on 500 companies at once, and no report read explains why that one arrived first.
The classification question underneath it is still open. Hyperliquid's policy arm spent August arguing that cash-settled perpetuals should be classified by their economic structure rather than by the asset they reference, which would put contracts on individual stocks in the same category as contracts on bitcoin. Tuesday's listing does not settle that question, which concerns contracts on individual stocks rather than broad indexes.
Traffic between prediction markets and brokerages now runs both ways. In June, Charles Schwab and Cboe moved toward S&P 500 binary options for retail customers, a product shaped like the ones Kalshi and Polymarket spent three years establishing. Kalshi is now listing leveraged index exposure, which is the kind of product a brokerage offers. Polymarket's perpetuals remain limited to international customers, and it launched commodity perpetuals on September 3 with leverage of up to 20 times on selected assets, according to DeFi Rate.
Kalshi's event contracts are still contested on separate grounds. The Sixth Circuit held last month that its sports contracts are not swaps, putting them outside the CFTC's exclusive jurisdiction, and New Jersey's petition is waiting at the Supreme Court. That litigation concerns sports event contracts rather than index futures. Kalshi has published no volume or open interest for the US 500 perpetual since it began trading, and the launch reports carry none.
