Kalshi has asked regulators for permission to list perpetual futures tied to foreign exchange and interest rates, according to Andy Ross, the exchange’s head of institutional, who disclosed the move on Monday’s episode of Bits + Bips.
“We put in today to do some FX and rates perpetuals as well,” Ross said on the show, referring to a submission made the same day. As of Tuesday afternoon, the filing had not appeared on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s public docket. Earlier Kalshi perpetual submissions also took several days to post publicly.
If approved, the filing would push a contract structure that could not legally be offered in the United States four months ago into currencies and interest rates, two underlying markets the report described as much larger than crypto.
How far Kalshi has already pushed perpetuals
A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry that stays close to spot through a periodic funding payment. For years, it was largely a crypto-native instrument and, onshore in the United States, available to very few people.
The CFTC approved Kalshi’s bitcoin contract in late May, making it the first regulated domestic perpetual in the country. Ether and XRP followed within days.
Since then, Kalshi has kept expanding and has moved beyond crypto. In July, the exchange filed for perpetuals on gold, silver, and platinum. On August 18, it submitted US500, a perpetual tied to the MerQube US Large Cap Index, a 500-name float-weighted benchmark of large U.S.-listed companies. It filed for a copper contract that same day.
Ross said the gold contract is nearing launch. “We’re about to launch a series of markets like on gold, so we’re gonna have a gold perpetual,” he said.
Adding currencies and rates would leave only a small number of major asset classes outside the product set. Ross said that is the idea. “We’ve got fixed income, we’ve got rates, we’ve got tokens, and they all fit in a user interface that retail can get involved in the order book directly through our platform, but also institutional can via their FCMs,” he said.
Leverage remains a central point of scrutiny
One of the main objections to perpetuals is that offshore venues often pair them with leverage levels that retail traders do not withstand.
Ross said the regulated framework is the limiting factor. “Because they sit inside a regulated perimeter, we don’t offer huge amounts of leverage,” he said.
He added that traders can set their own leverage below that ceiling, with the cap depending on how volatile the underlying asset is.
Ross used the same line of argument for prediction markets more broadly, drawing a distinction between onshore and offshore venues. “There’s a huge difference between an onshore prediction market and an offshore prediction market,” he said, pointing in part to whether a platform runs know-your-customer checks.
The study Ross cited in Kalshi’s case
Ross also pointed to a calibration study published on Kalshi’s research site. He said it covered 2.2 million data points and tested whether the exchange’s market prices matched real-world outcomes.
“They pretty much sit along that straight line,” he said of the results.
The part he highlighted was that the relationship still held with more lead time and lower trading volume. “They sit along that straight line one week out, and they sit along that straight line when maybe only $50,000, $60,000 is traded on that market. So you don’t need institutional size to have a really well-calibrated market,” Ross said.
That claim is central to Kalshi’s regulatory argument as described in the report. A thinner market that still prices accurately is easier to defend as price discovery than as gambling, which is also the terrain where the exchange has been fighting state regulators.
Market count has risen from about 4,000 to 10,000
Ross said that since he joined Kalshi six or seven months ago, the number of markets on the exchange has increased from about 4,000 to 10,000. Activity, he said, has spread across those markets rather than concentrating in only a few.
“We don’t just need to have everybody correlated around the very biggest, most liquid points,” he said.
What comes next depends on the filing path
Whether the FX and rates contracts reach market will depend on the route Kalshi used for the submission.
The report noted that Kalshi’s US500 filing went in under Commission Regulation 40.3(a), a voluntary request for review and approval that waits on the agency. Self-certification is the faster path and allows a contract to list without pre-clearance.
Once the filing posts publicly, it should show which route Kalshi chose.