Author: David, Bankless
Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow
DeepOcean Summary: Against the backdrop of long-standing regulatory bans on offshore crypto exchanges offering stock perpetual contracts, the U.S. compliant exchange Kalshi has achieved a major regulatory breakthrough. Just two days after the CFTC officially permitted registered exchanges to offer single-stock perpetual contracts, Kalshi swiftly launched perpetual products covering more than 50 major U.S. stocks and ETFs. This article provides a quick overview of its product mechanics, regulatory classification, and the enthusiastic market response.
Launched just two days after regulatory easing
Just two days after the CFTC officially approved the registration of an exchange to list single-stock perpetual contracts (SSPs), the prediction market platform Kalshi officially launched over 50 stock underlying assets and announced that its single-sided trading volume had quickly surpassed $3 billion that morning.
Kalshi is launching its regulated single-stock perpetual futures, covering more than 50 leading U.S. stocks and benchmark ETFs, and claims to be the first licensed and compliant institution in the U.S. to publicly offer this financial product.
Product Mechanism and Joint Regulatory Characteristics
In product design, investors can go long or short on individual stocks without physically holding the underlying spot shares, with no fixed settlement date and no rollover fees associated with traditional futures.
Kalshi's initial listing includes core weighted blue-chip stocks from the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The official statement indicates that these contracts are legally classified as security futures and are subject to joint regulation by the CFTC and SEC. Previously, newly appointed CFTC Chair Mike Selig explicitly stated that compliant exchanges offering single-stock perpetual contracts are fully legal.
Trading热度 and potential legal tug-of-war
Kalshi co-founder Lopes Lara hailed stock perpetual contracts as the most transformative flagship product since the platform's inception, noting that the $300 million trading volume on its launch morning was achieved organically, without large-scale external promotion.
Despite historic breakthroughs in its financial derivatives business, Kalshi faces local legal resistance in the sports prediction contract space. A federal judge in California recently issued a preliminary injunction against its sports betting-style contracts operated on Native American tribal land; the Attorney General of Arkansas has also filed a lawsuit challenging the classification of these activities as gambling. However, in the mainstream securities derivatives market, the launch of compliant perpetual contracts has irrevocably opened a new trillion-dollar battleground.
