Kalshi built its reputation letting users trade on elections, inflation prints, and Fed decisions. Now it wants to be where traders speculate on Bitcoin prices with leverage.
The prediction market platform plans to launch perpetual futures tied to the prices of cryptocurrencies in the coming weeks, according to a Bloomberg report, citing a person familiar with the plans.
The move marks the first time Kalshi will offer a product outside its core event contract business and it puts the company in direct competition with some of the biggest names in crypto.
What happens when a platform built for betting on outcomes starts offering leveraged crypto trades? The answer matters for prediction market users, crypto traders, and anyone watching the future of financial derivatives in the United States.
What Kalshi Actually Does
Kalshi is a federally regulated prediction market. Its core product is event contracts, binary yes/no markets on real-world outcomes. Users can trade on whether the Federal Reserve will cut rates, whether inflation will exceed a target, or who will win a presidential election. Unlike a traditional brokerage, Kalshi users are not buying assets. They are pricing probabilities.
That distinction matters. Kalshi’s users are already traders in a meaningful sense — they are assigning values to uncertain outcomes, managing positions, and taking on risk. The cognitive leap to crypto derivatives is shorter than it might appear.
Bernstein recently estimated that prediction market volumes will grow from approximately $51 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion by 2030. Kalshi sits at the top of that market alongside Polymarket. The question its expansion answers is: what do you build when you’ve dominated a niche and the niche is about to go mainstream?
What Are Perpetual Futures?
A perpetual future or “perp”, is a derivative contract that tracks the price of an underlying asset, typically a cryptocurrency, with no expiration date. Unlike a standard futures contract that settles on a fixed date, a perp stays open indefinitely. Traders pay or receive a funding rate — a …