Kalshi Plans to Seek Clearance for 60 Single-Stock Perpetuals

Kalshi wants to list perpetual futures on individual stocks, and that needs two federal agencies to agree with each other. The exchange plans to seek approval for roughly 60 such contracts tied to shares and exchange-traded funds, Tesla, Apple and Nvidia among the names. A perpetual future has no expiry date and trades around the clock, a structure borrowed from crypto venues where it has run for years. Futures on a single company's shares are supervised in the United States by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission together. The Wall Street Journal reported the plan late on Thursday, and three outlets picked it up on 11 September.

A plan, or a filing

CoinDesk, Benzinga and CoinCentral all describe an intention. Kalshi plans to seek approval, and not one of them reports a filing, a docket number or a date for either. A Bloomberg headline returned in search says the exchange has filed. The desk did not reach that story, so the two descriptions sit unreconciled and this article follows the three accounts it could read in full. Benzinga says it approached Kalshi and had no immediate response. Nothing published names a first listing date.

Why both agencies

A future on one company's shares is a hybrid, part security and part derivative, and US law splits supervision of it accordingly. That makes equity perpetuals a harder ask than anything Kalshi has cleared so far. The CFTC approved its bitcoin perpetual in May 2026, acting alone. The exchange has since launched gold and silver perpetuals that trade continuously with leverage of up to 15 times, and its position, in remarks Benzinga carried, is that the leverage is "comparable to traditional futures and lower than many offshore alternatives". Single-company contracts would be capped to issuers worth $100 billion or more. Cleared, they would be the first regulated single-stock perpetuals offered in the United States.

Citadel has already written to both

Citadel Securities put its objection in a letter to the SEC and the CFTC, warning that equity-linked perpetuals supervised outside the SEC could create a "parallel shadow market" cut off from the surveillance covering US stocks and options. Two risks are named in CoinDesk's account of the letter: trading on inside information through perps while the stock market is shut, and the absence of coordination when a share is halted but its perpetual keeps trading. The letter went to both agencies. Neither has said anything publicly about the contracts, on the record available at the time of writing.

The demand the proposal is chasing

Offshore venues have already shown what the product does when nobody has to clear it first. Benzinga and CoinCentral both report that leveraged single-stock perpetual volume on Hyperliquid rose from $4 billion at the start of 2026 to $212 billion, a figure that traces back to the same newspaper report and that CoinDesk's page does not carry. Those markets have their own record. An SK Hynix perpetual flash-crashed on Hyperliquid this year, in a venue with no equity surveillance behind it. Kalshi has spent 2026 winning arguments about what it is allowed to list, among them a Connecticut ruling that its sports contracts were never swaps. This one is different, because the answer has to come from two agencies at once, and neither has started the clock.