Polymarket opened its perpetual futures product to traders on September 3, pushing the prediction market platform beyond the yes-or-no election and sports contracts that drove its rise during the 2024 presidential election cycle.
Perps debut with 10 markets, then expand to 67
The new product, called Perps, went live with 10 initial markets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, HYPE, gold, silver, WTI oil, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, and a contract tracking SpaceX shares. According to Polymarket’s product page, the list grew to 67 markets within hours.
Polymarket had first teased the feature in April, when it pointed to a 10x leverage cap.
How the product differs from Polymarket’s standard contracts
Perpetual futures operate differently from Polymarket’s usual contracts, which settle at either $1 or $0 once an event is resolved. A perpetual contract tracks the price of its underlying asset on a continuous basis and does not expire. To keep the contract aligned with spot, long and short traders exchange payments through an hourly funding rate.
Polymarket’s documentation says that funding rate is capped at 4% per hour in either direction.
Leverage rules cover crypto, commodities, indexes, and stocks
Polymarket caps leverage at 20x for crypto, the S&P 500, oil, gold, and silver. Individual stocks and other real-world assets are capped at 10x. Among the 36 listed equities named in the report are Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, and Coinbase.
Maintenance margin is set at half the maximum leverage rate. In practice, that means a fully leveraged 20x position can be liquidated after losing roughly 2.5% of the margin posted.
Company pitches cross-market trades from one account
In its launch promotion on X, Polymarket described a compound trade that would let a user go long Bitcoin, bet on the Federal Reserve’s next move, and short the S&P 500’s reaction from a single account.
The company also said the product offers the deepest liquidity and lowest fees among crypto perpetual futures venues.
Access is blocked in the United States and several other jurisdictions
The product is not available to Polymarket’s American users. The company’s FAQ bars order placement from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.
U.S. traders are routed to Polymarket US, a separate exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.
Launch lands in a market already contested by Kalshi and Hyperliquid
That business split follows Polymarket’s 2022 settlement with the CFTC. The regulator found that the company had operated an unregistered swaps facility, fined it $1.4 million, and ordered it to wind down noncompliant contracts. Polymarket later returned to the U.S. market in a more limited form.
Kalshi reached the U.S. market more than three months earlier. On May 29, the CFTC approved Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual futures contract, allowing the rival prediction market to describe it as the first onshore perpetual futures product in the country. Kalshi has since filed for perpetuals tied to a dozen altcoins, along with a separate copper contract.
The larger competitive challenge may come from Hyperliquid, the decentralized exchange that already dominates on-chain perpetual futures trading. The report says President Donald Trump himself has said Hyperliquid is working with the CFTC and will open itself to U.S. traders very soon.
A recent Bloomberg report added to that discussion, saying Hyperliquid is already in talks with Payward, the parent company of Kraken, to make that happen.