Kalshi filed paperwork with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in late August asking for approval to launch kalshi treasury perpetual futures — a contract that lets traders bet on the direction of the 10-year US Treasury yield with no expiration date. The CFTC has pushed its review out to November 29, a sign regulators see this as a genuinely new kind of product, not a simple variation on something they’ve already approved.
That filing matters beyond the bond market. Kalshi started life as a place to trade on elections and weather. It is now trying to become a full derivatives exchange that happens to have grown out of a prediction market. Treasury yields would be its first step into fixed income, the part of finance that sets mortgage rates and government borrowing costs.
What Kalshi Actually Filed
The submission, dated August 31, asked the CFTC to treat the filing as confidential. That request became moot once the regulator notified Kalshi it needed an extra 45 days to study the product, pushing the decision deadline to November 29.
Perpetual futures, or “perps,” never expire. A trader can hold a position indefinitely instead of rolling it into a new contract every month or quarter. To keep the contract price tethered to the real-world Treasury yield, Kalshi uses a funding rate that changes hands between long and short positions every few hours, the same mechanism it already runs on its crypto perps.
Why Treasury Yields Are a Bigger Deal Than Crude Oil or Gold
Kalshi has filed for perpetual contracts on a growing list of assets this year. Crypto came first, launching May 29. Gold and silver followed with CFTC approval on September 10. A contract tracking the US500 stock index came next, and on October 7 Kalshi submitted a bid for a perpetual-style WTI crude oil contract, according to Bloomberg’s reporting.
Treasury yields sit in a different category. Crypto and commodities are volatile markets that retail traders already speculate on through other venues. The 10-year yield drives prices across the entire economy, from car loans to corporate debt. Letting retail traders take leveraged, no-expiry positions on that number is a bigger ask of a regulator, which is likely part of why the CFTC wants more time.
Perpetuals Are Becoming Kalshi’s Real Business
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour has been direct about where the company is headed. In the official announcement of the crypto perps launch, he described it as marking Kalshi’s evolution “from prediction market leader to next-gen derivatives exchange,” adding that perpetuals “remove a constraint” that had always been present in traditional futures markets.
That ambition lines up with other moves the company has made this year to build out the infrastructure of a real exchange rather than just a betting app. We covered one piece of that build-out in our look at Kalshi Klear’s margin trading filing, which laid the groundwork for letting traders use leverage across products instead of funding each position separately. A Treasury perpetual fits neatly into that same push toward acting like a conventional derivatives venue, just one still carrying the Kalshi brand.
The scale of money behind this shift is hard to miss. Kalshi is reportedly closing in on a roughly $1 billion funding round at a $40 billion valuation, up from $22 billion in May, with existing backers Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management said to be considering leading the round. Investors are not just betting on election markets. They’re betting on Kalshi turning into something closer to a full-service trading platform, with perpetuals as a core part of that story.
Polymarket Is Racing to Catch Up
Kalshi is not the only prediction market chasing this business. Polymarket rolled out its own perpetual futures product through a beta in late May and widened access through the summer, offering leveraged positions on crypto, stocks, and indices with up to 20x leverage on its international site. US users are routed to a separate Polymarket.us entity instead.
The two platforms are increasingly competing on the same turf, even though they built their reputations on very different kinds of markets. For readers trying to keep the two straight, our Polymarket vs Kalshi comparison breaks down where each platform still differs on regulation, product range, and who can actually trade what. Perpetual futures are quickly becoming one more column in that comparison, not a side feature.
What Happens If the CFTC Says Yes
If the Treasury perpetual clears review by November 29, Kalshi would be offering leveraged, no-expiry exposure to US government bond yields through a retail-facing app, something that currently has no close equivalent in US markets open to ordinary traders. That would put Kalshi’s product lineup closer to a full-spectrum brokerage than to the election and sports contracts that built its brand.
It would also raise the stakes for the CFTC. Every new perpetual contract Kalshi gets approved makes the next one look more routine, and a Treasury yield product sets a precedent for applying the same no-expiry, funding-rate structure to other closely watched economic indicators. Whatever the agency decides in late November, the filing itself confirms that Kalshi’s ambitions have moved well past prediction markets as most people still think of them.
