Key Facts Kalshi has filed to list 60 stock perpetual futures contracts, including Tesla, Nvidia and Apple. The filing follows the CFTC’s earlier approval of Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual future
Key Facts
Kalshi has submitted a filing seeking approval to list 60 perpetual futures contracts tied to individual stocks, including Tesla, Nvidia and Apple, according to filings submitted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The move extends a product structure that crypto traders have used for years, perpetual futures with no expiration date, into a market, single-stock derivatives, that has historically been walled off from that kind of instrument in the United States.
A perpetual future is a derivatives contract with no settlement date, kept anchored to the underlying asset’s price through a periodic funding payment between long and short positions rather than through expiry and rollover, the mechanism every traditional futures contract has relied on for a century. Crypto exchanges invented the widespread retail version of this structure because crypto trades continuously, with no market close, so a contract that never expires and never needs a Sunday-night rollover fit the asset class naturally. Kalshi’s own explainer on perpetual futures describes the same funding-rate mechanism crypto traders already recognize from that world.
Bringing that structure to Tesla and Nvidia means retail traders could get continuous, leveraged exposure to individual stocks outside the hours when the stock exchanges themselves are even open, something the existing options and futures market on those names does not offer in the same form. That is the actual product innovation here, not the leverage itself, since leveraged stock exposure already exists through options and margin. It is the always-on, expiry-free wrapper that is new to U.S. equities.
This filing is not Kalshi’s first move into perpetuals. The CFTC’s approval of Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract established the regulatory template the exchange is now trying to extend across 60 individual equities at once. Whether the same reasoning that cleared a bitcoin perpetual applies just as cleanly to Tesla and Nvidia is the actual regulatory question the CFTC now has to answer, since stock-linked derivatives carry a different oversight history and different investor-protection assumptions than crypto-linked ones did.
If approved, the filing would mark one of the largest simultaneous expansions of perpetual-style products into traditional equities to date, and it would test how far a regulator willing to approve crypto perpetuals is willing to go once the underlying asset is a stock instead of a token.
This post first appeared in Kalshi Seeks Approval for 60 Perpetual Futures on Tesla, Nvidia and More
