Kalshi has filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to seek approval for perpetual futures tied to a U.S. equity index and to copper. If regulators allow the contracts, the move would push the company further beyond prediction markets and deeper into the territory of traditional derivatives.
Perpetual futures, often called perps, are futures-style contracts with no expiration. CNBC described them as contracts that track an asset continuously and use funding payments to keep the contract price close to the market price, while traders do not need to own the underlying asset.
The equity filing centres on a contract called US500. It would be tied to the MerQube U.S. Large Cap Index, which tracks the largest 500 companies listed and based in the U.S. Quartz reported that no SEC approval is required for the contract because broad-based equity baskets fall within the CFTC’s regulatory purview rather than the SEC’s.
Kalshi also sought approval for a copper perpetual future. The contract, called COPPERPERP, would be cash-settled, with no physical copper changing hands. It would reference the spot price of copper in U.S. dollars per pound through the Pyth Network XCU/USD price feed.
The copper filing is unusually specific. Each contract would represent 1,000 pounds of copper, with a minimum tick of $0.0005 per pound. Trading would run continuously from 6:00 PM Eastern time on Sunday to 5:00 PM Eastern on Friday, and funding payments would be calculated daily at 10:00 AM Eastern on weekdays to keep the contract aligned with the spot reference price.
The latest applications extend a broader push. Quartz said Kalshi had filed a month earlier for perpetual futures on precious metals such as gold and silver, and that the new equity and copper requests fit its effort to position itself as a multi-asset derivatives exchange competing with established operators.
That effort accelerated in late May, when the CFTC approved Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual contract. Quartz said Kalshi became the first company to offer regulated domestic perpetual futures in the U.S. at that point, and the company said perps recorded more than $90 trillion in global volume in 2025.
Kalshi has also said its own crypto perps crossed $1 billion in notional volume within a week of launch. At a June event introducing the product, the company said it wanted to be seen as a full-fledged, multi-asset financial exchange, and engineer Lior Hirschfeld called it “the next step towards building the largest exchange on the planet.”
