Kalshi Quietly Ships Single-Stock Perps, Tops $300M Before the Announcement

Kalshi's new single-stock perpetual futures racked up more than $300 million in trading volume before the company even told anyone they existed. Co-founder Luana Lopes Lara shared that figure on the morning of November 5, 2026, covering activity from a quiet stealth rollout. The CFTC-regulated prediction market is now elbow-deep in equity derivatives, its first move into that world.

The pitch is simple: a stock bet that never ends. Perps carry no expiration date and no rollover fees, so traders can go long or short on individual names without owning a single share. At launch the menu spans more than 50 stocks and ETFs listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ, including McDonald's, Palantir, Meta, Qualcomm and NVIDIA.

Contracts are deliberately tiny. Each one represents 0.02 shares, meaning 50 contracts equal one full share. Instead of an expiry, they use daily funding payments settled at 4:00 PM ET. Leverage varies by stock, starting around 4.9x for some assets at launch, a level Kalshi says complies with CFTC rules, so $100 of margin can control roughly $490 of position. Kalshi Klear LLC, the company's own clearing arm, handles all contracts.

Here's how it slid through the gate. Kalshi filed on September 18, 2026, and the CFTC's 45-day review window closed on November 2, 2026. Because the agency didn't block the filing, the product was approved automatically. The stealth launch came within days and the public announcement followed on November 5. That's not the same as a warm endorsement, and Kalshi has drawn ongoing regulatory scrutiny as it expands.

Single-stock perps aren't new. They've traded offshore for years, where annual transaction volume has topped $4.5 trillion, largely out of reach of US regulators. Kalshi is dragging that category inside a regulated American framework, expanding beyond the event contracts and crypto offerings it built its name on.

The stakes are rising fast. Kalshi recently raised $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, and one widely shared post on X predicted the platform will become Robinhood's biggest rival as the product catches on. But leverage cuts both ways: a modest move against a position can erase a meaningful chunk of margin, and those daily funding payments are a recurring cost stock owners never pay.