Kalshi perpetual futures volume hit $1 billion within a week of launch, the company said, offering the first concrete measure of how much pent-up US demand existed for a product that had no domestic legal home until last month.
The platform officially began trading crypto perpetual futures on a Wednesday. In the first 24 hours alone, more than $100 million changed hands. Those figures are notional, meaning the leverage traders apply to their contracts is included.
Perpetual futures, known in crypto circles as perps, are futures contracts with no expiration date. Traders can speculate on an asset’s price without owning it, and a system of periodic funding payments keeps the contract price in line with the underlying market.
Kalshi Perpetual Futures Volume Puts the US Market on the Map
The asset class has grown rapidly offshore. Kalshi’s official launch announcement notes that offshore perpetual futures grew from $28 trillion in annual volume in 2023 to over $90 trillion by 2025, making them one of the fastest-growing asset classes in recent memory. A document filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission estimated that perpetual derivatives now account for upwards of 90% of all crypto futures trading volume, surpassing traditional expiring contracts by a wide margin.
Until now, US traders had no regulated domestic route into these contracts. The CFTC approved Kalshi on 29 May to become the first company in the United States to offer perp contracts. Coinbase received approval on the same day to offer its US traders access to global perp contracts through an affiliate.
Demand was visible even before the doors opened. Kalshi says the waitlist to access perps on its platform at one point exceeded 1 million people, and the company describes it as the fastest-growing product in its history. For context, it took Kalshi 40 months to reach $1 billion in cumulative trading volume across its existing event contracts.
From Prediction Markets to Perps
Founded in 2018, Kalshi built its name on prediction markets and describes itself as the world’s largest in that category, according to its Series E announcement, which put the company’s valuation at $11 billion. Perpetuals represent the biggest product expansion since the original prediction-market launch.
The company has already been adding to its perp contract range. On 2 June 2026, KalshiEX LLC self-certified a Polkadot perpetual futures contract (DOTPERP) with the CFTC under Regulation 40.2(a), according to the CFTC filing signed by Xavier Sottile, Head of Markets at KalshiEX LLC. A separate SOLPERP contract filing covers a Solana perpetual future, using CF Benchmarks’ CME CF Solana-Dollar Real Time Index (SOLUSD_RTI) for funding-rate calculations and settlement pricing. CF Benchmarks is an FCA-authorised benchmark administrator independently audited by KPMG.
The product line does have defined limits. Kalshi has stated that perpetual futures on agricultural commodities will not form part of its offering.
Kalshi perpetual futures volume has now compressed into one week what its prediction-market business took more than three years to accumulate. The real test is whether liquidity deepens as the waitlist clears and institutional participants enter a market that, offshore, already turns over tens of trillions of dollars each year.
